Case Studies › Fracture

E-commerce & Retail

Glass-Thin Margins, Zero Room for Downtime

Fracture's handcrafted glass prints are a hit — but their backend couldn't keep pace with holiday surges. Techdots rebuilt their order intake pipeline, production queue routing, and fulfillment integrations so every order moves from checkout to glass cutter without manual intervention or dropped jobs.

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Fracture

E-commerce & Retail

4.2x

peak order throughput vs. prior holiday season

61%

reduction in fulfillment error rate

18 min

avg. order-to-print-queue time, down from 3+ hrs

14 weeks

timeline

This engagement is best for

Direct-to-consumer brands with physical manufacturing constraints

E-commerce companies facing holiday surge bottlenecks

Retailers whose checkout-to-fulfillment pipeline relies on manual steps

Businesses integrating multiple production partners or print facilities

The Transformation

Before & After

Before

✕ Order intake was partially manual — staff had to triage and route jobs to print queues by hand during peak periods

✕ Holiday surges caused multi-hour delays between checkout and production start, leading to missed ship dates

✕ Shopify order data and the internal production system were loosely coupled via brittle CSV exports that regularly failed

✕ No real-time visibility into queue depth across production lines — fulfillment team flying blind during high-volume days

✕ Customer service bore the brunt of fulfillment uncertainty, spending hours daily chasing order status across disconnected systems

After

✓ Fully automated order ingestion routes every job to the correct print queue within 18 minutes of checkout, no human touch required

✓ System handled 4.2x prior peak volume during the following holiday season with zero fulfillment system outages

✓ Shopify webhooks feed a durable job queue with retry logic — CSV handoffs eliminated entirely

✓ Live production dashboard gives fulfillment leads real-time queue depth, job status, and estimated completion per line

✓ Customer service tickets related to order status dropped 44% in the first full quarter post-launch

What We Built

Deliverables & Scope

Every item below was chosen because it directly addressed a business bottleneck — not because it was technically interesting.

Shopify webhook ingestion service with idempotent job creation and dead-letter queue for failed events — replacing fragile CSV polling

Production routing engine that assigns orders to print queues based on size, substrate type, facility capacity, and SLA tier in real time

Internal fulfillment dashboard built in React showing live queue depth, per-line throughput, and job-level status with one-click hold/release controls

Automated pre-flight validation layer that checks uploaded image resolution, aspect ratio, and color profile before a job enters the print queue — rejecting bad files with customer-facing guidance

Shipment event pipeline integrating ShipStation webhooks to push tracking updates back into Shopify and trigger transactional emails without manual reconciliation

Load-tested job queue infrastructure on AWS SQS + worker pool sized for 5x projected peak, with auto-scaling policies tuned to Fracture's historical demand curve

ROI Logic

Why This Generated
Real Business Value

Fracture's revenue is heavily concentrated in Q4 — a fulfillment failure during that window is an existential risk, not just an operational inconvenience. By eliminating manual routing and replacing brittle CSV integrations with a durable, event-driven pipeline, Techdots turned peak season from a scramble into a repeatable playbook. The reduction in fulfillment errors alone — at Fracture's average order value and reprint cost — recovered the engagement cost within the first holiday cycle.

Key Outcomes

4.2x

peak order throughput vs. prior holiday season

61%

reduction in fulfillment error rate

18 min

avg. order-to-print-queue time, down from 3+ hrs

Why It Worked

The Decisions That
Made the Difference

Good execution matters. But the right early decisions matter more.

We mapped the physical production flow first — understanding glass print manufacturing constraints meant the routing engine made decisions that actually matched floor reality, not just software logic

Idempotency was non-negotiable: every order event could be replayed safely, so webhook failures and network blips never resulted in duplicate or dropped jobs

The fulfillment dashboard was co-designed with the floor leads who would use it daily — not with product managers — which meant adoption was immediate and the tooling surfaced the right signals

We load-tested against 5x projected peak before go-live, not 2x, giving the team genuine confidence rather than cautious optimism heading into the holiday season

Tech Stack

AWS SQS Sidekiq

Integrations

Shopify Webhooks API ShipStation API Twilio SendGrid (transactional email) AWS S3 (image asset storage and pre-flight processing) Slack (internal ops alerting)

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