My first gig was at a small software retailer, straight out of high school and balancing study at uni. Picture a GameStop competitor but selling home/commercial software and licensing as well as games.
The owner’s approach was to employ a series of teenagers who saw this as an opportunity to get that elusive “foot in the door” first job experience despite being paid less than half minimum wage for the hours we were actually paid for (hard not to envy today’s junior Devs walking into jobs out of uni today, yet alone the eye watering salaries, but then again there’s something to be said with romanticised rear vision for working your way up the ladder during that golden age of the early modern web).
Two of us, while balancing sales and service to customers, and keeping the store running (receiving and unpacking stock, boxing up and posting customer orders, phone calls, stocktake, cleaning, directing the occasional casual staff), without any formal education, with tools that don’t match today (no especially useful libraries or tools, eg pre-jQuery, Ajax just catching on and feeling like magic, plain PHP, .NET 2.0 without an ORM etc.), built and maintained a website that in my view rivalled Amazon’s UX at the time (we developed some novel ways to group and present licensing and editions that surpassed Amazon in this space).
On top of this we developed and maintained a bespoke WinForms POS/inventory/accounting system that handled all sales and ordering etc., supporting tools to handle pricing/forecasting, automation scripts to keep customers updated etc., and a series of integrations with suppliers to pull near-live stock availability and pricing for perhaps 40k SKUs from around 80 suppliers (none of whom had APIs so we were screen scraping custom portals, parsing the odd PDF price list, or best case pulling CSV email attachments).
The net effect was with minimal operational effort we could effectively compete with far larger businesses and provide a better experience.
This included the ability, with near zero-touch, to surface a comprehensive catalogue of stock while maintaining minimal inventory, automatically take customer orders, place corresponding supplier orders based on the best price at that point in time (rationalising and aligning across price lists, with consideration of preferential contract terms or shipping timelines), publish near-live pricing and ETA changes, administer a customer loyalty program, and provide automatic updates to customers.
We just got stuff done because we didn’t know any better.
I know this is several scales lower in complexity than Amazon, eg fraud detection, volume of catalog and sales, reseller accounts etc. but again we were not 1000s of Stanford and MIT educated engineers.
Incidentally this has shaped my view of the undervalued power of having bespoke software supporting your core business operations, despite also driving home the risks and perils of reinventing the wheel.