Infrastructure for the one day a year that pays for the rest of them
Black Friday, product drops, flash sales — traffic that arrives in minutes and leaves in hours. We build AWS environments that scale into the spike, hold 99.99% availability through it, and scale back out before the bill notices. Validated by AWS with the Retail Consulting Competency.
AWS Retail Consulting Competency · AWS Managed Service Provider (audited) · Black Friday-proven since 2010 · 5.0 on Clutch
Peak traffic is a math problem your infrastructure either solves or fails
- Provision for Black Friday year-round and you burn money 364 days. Provision for average load and you’re down on the day that matters.
- Every 100ms of latency on a product page is measurable lost revenue — at peak, it compounds.
- A crashed checkout during a promotion isn’t downtime, it’s the marketing budget set on fire in public.
- Payment flows drag PCI DSS into scope whether you planned for it or not.
- The team that handles the spike is the same team shipping features — unless the infrastructure handles it alone.
Autoscaling that actually works under a 10x surge is not a checkbox. It’s load-tested architecture, and it’s what the Retail Competency was awarded for.
What we build for retail
Peak-ready autoscaling
Load-tested against your real traffic patterns, not synthetic hello-world benchmarks. Kubernetes on EKS with Karpenter, warmed for the spike, scaled to baseline after.
Cost that tracks revenue, not fear
Right-sizing, Spot for stateless workloads, scheduled non-production shutdowns. Intertop spends 0.05% of Black Friday online profit on AWS — that ratio is the design goal.
Speed as a feature
CDN strategy, caching layers, database tuning. Documented response times of 0.2s under peak load.
Checkout that stays up
Fault-tolerant, multi-AZ architecture for the flows that make money. 99.99% availability in production environments we operate.
PCI DSS built in
Payment infrastructure engineered to pass assessment — see our PCI DSS practice. Payment processors pass annual certification on environments we build.
Season readiness as a service
Load testing, capacity planning, game-day runbooks before your peak — and senior engineers on-call during it, under our audited MSP practice.
Numbers our clients let us publish
Intertop — retail fashion
0.05% of Black Friday online profit spent on AWS · 0.2s response time · 60% saved on autoscaling, 70% on Spot. Case study →
Foxtrot — electronics retail
AWS costs down 46% via migration and dynamic environments · isolated dev environments that ended deploy conflicts. Case study →
Pandora — jewelry
99.99% availability through migration and modernization. Case study →
Event Decor Direct — USA
Revenue up 416% on infrastructure that went from 96% to 99.99% uptime with autoscaling, Docker and CI/CD. Case study →
Yakaboo — marketplace
99.997% uptime · 300k+ SKUs · 71 languages. Case study →
Super Cheap Signs — USA
99.997% uptime, autoscaling and containerization for print e-commerce. Case study →
Featured clients
Why us
Validated by AWS, not by our own website
The Retail Consulting Competency is awarded after AWS audits real retail projects and references. Most agencies claiming "e-commerce expertise" have a portfolio page; we have the audit.
We've run your worst-case day
Since 2010: Black Fridays, product drops, TV-moment traffic. The playbooks exist because we've executed them.
Infrastructure only
No development department, no replatforming agenda, no incentive to touch your storefront code. We make whatever you run — headless, monolith, or in-between — fast, stable, and cheap to operate.
Senior engineers on the pager
When it's 9pm on Black Friday, the person responding has done this before. Founder-led, no juniors on production.
FAQ
Can you prepare us for Black Friday if we start now?
Depends on the calendar — readiness work (load testing, autoscaling validation, capacity plan, runbooks) typically needs weeks, not days. The honest answer comes from the 30-minute call. Start earlier than feels necessary; peak season doesn’t reschedule.
We're on Shopify / a SaaS platform for the storefront. Is there anything for you to do?
Often yes — the storefront is rarely the whole system. Middleware, integrations, search, personalization, data pipelines, and custom services usually run on cloud infrastructure that spikes with the same traffic. That’s the part we own.
Do we need Kubernetes?
Not always, and we’ll say so. EKS with Karpenter is our default for spiky retail load because it scales fastest per dollar, but the audit of your actual traffic decides — not our preference.
What does peak readiness cost?
Fixed price after a scoping call, sized to your architecture. The comparison that matters: Intertop’s entire Black Friday AWS spend was 0.05% of that day’s online profit.
Can you also handle our payment compliance?
Yes — PCI DSS infrastructure is a dedicated practice: see how it works.
Thirty minutes, one engineer, your traffic graph
Show us last year’s peak and this year’s forecast. You’ll leave the call knowing whether your infrastructure holds, where it breaks first, and what fixing it costs. The read is yours either way.