Shopify Operator
Two-year e-commerce build, run and close.
- Cumulative revenue
- ₹20M (~$240K)
- Tenure
- Two years
- Outcome
- Closed for grad school
Before grad school I ran independent Shopify storefronts for two years. Not consulted on, not contracted to. Owned and operated, day-to-day. Everything was custom: CMS workflows, theme code, inventory pipeline, customer journeys, ad creative. Cumulative sales reached ₹20M, roughly $240K.
The work was where I first started writing software seriously. The most useful piece was an address-verification pipeline in Python, hitting Google Maps and the Shopify API to validate every order's address against IP and city/state at submission time. Wrong addresses are the largest single source of return-to-origin (RTO) loss in Indian e-commerce; this caught roughly 7% of orders before fulfilment, saving six-figure INR annually. Boring infrastructure, real money.
I list it because it teaches the work in a way coursework cannot. Shipping is a habit, not a milestone. Real users do not care about your stack. The cost of a half-finished feature is paid every day until it is finished. I closed the operation deliberately when the move to MSCS was on the table. Running both at scale would have meant doing neither well.