Turning a hand-measured quoting process into one button

The problem

Gemstone Lights sells outdoor Christmas lighting: the lights, the clips, the brackets, and the full installation. Their process was almost entirely manual. Someone measured every distance by hand and then built each quote by hand. The site ran on WordPress and WooCommerce, which was straining under a growing load on a business already doing millions in sales.

What I built

They brought me in as a backend developer to rearchitect the application from the ground up. There was a team lead and a frontend developer on the project, but in practice I played the technical lead, owning the architecture and building the backend on AWS serverless: API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, Cognito, Route 53, CloudWatch, and the supporting pieces around them.

The hard part was the quoting. Their products involve slopes, different geometric shapes, and many material variations, all of which feed into the price. I sat with the installers, the manager, and the manufacturer to learn exactly how it worked, then turned that logic into an algorithm and wrapped it in something a salesperson could run by clicking a few times. I also migrated their products, with all their variations, along with their order and invoice management, off WooCommerce. Doing that on a live business with real revenue moving through it left no room for a sloppy handoff.

The result

A quoting process that used to mean manual measurement and manual math became a few clicks. I delivered the architecture and the first version of the platform over a six month contract. It is also one of two custom quoting engines I have built for different companies, which means this is not a one-time trick. It is something I have done more than once, for businesses that depend on getting the number right.