What this blog is for, and what it will not be

Most company blogs are a content-marketing surface with a product wrapped around it. This one is meant to be the other way round: the writing exists because the consulting work behind Badger Commerce keeps turning up the same problems, and those problems are worth writing down whether or not you ever buy anything from us.

Six themes#

The blog is organised into six themes rather than a tag cloud. A tag cloud grows until nobody can find anything; six named themes force an editorial decision every time something is written.

Guides are practical how-to for ecommerce teams — the decisions, the trade-offs, the steps. Field notes are opinion and analysis from the consulting work. Case studies are what actually happened, named where we have permission and anonymised where we do not. Product is a deep dive on one Badger tool. Engineering is how the platform is built and run. News is announcements and incident notices.

Who it is written for#

Someone running an ecommerce operation: a merchandiser deciding what to mark down, an ecommerce manager arguing for headcount, a developer who has inherited a catalogue nobody has audited in three years. From the team behind platforms for FTSE 100 retailers and global brands — which means the writing assumes you already know what a stock file is, and does not assume you have a platform team of twenty to throw at the problem.

The rules we have set ourselves#

1. 1

   Every number carries a source

   A figure with no provenance is decoration. If a claim cannot be sourced, it comes out of the draft rather than going in with a hedge.

2. 2

   The merchant does the verb

   You plan the season. You set the price. The platform is supporting cast, and the writing should read that way.

3. 3

   One product mention, late

   Where a Badger tool is honestly part of the answer, we will say so once, near the end. Not in the opening paragraph, and not in every section heading.

What we have deliberately left out#

What happens to the old blog#

The previous blog at bdgr.co.uk/p/news goes back to 2020. Some of it is worth keeping — the ARM migration write-up, the CrowdStrike incident notice, the passkeys announcement, and one April Fool we are not prepared to retire. Much of the 2023 output was written for a different audience and will not be migrated. That is a curation decision, not an accident.

Where to start#

If you are new to the platform, the Commerce Lite edition is the shortest path from "catalogue in a spreadsheet" to "catalogue you can operate".