efantasy.gr

The problem

efantasy.gr is a Greek retail platform that had to do three hard things at once, and keep doing them for over a decade: hold a catalogue of 50,000+ SKUs across 37 categories, ship reliably to 70 countries, and never drift out of sync with the back office that actually runs the business. The ERP is the source of truth for stock, pricing and orders — the storefront can never contradict it, and “the site is down” is never an acceptable answer for a shop that trades every day.

What I did

I founded the platform and have been its principal engineer for 15+ years — this is end-to-end ownership, not a feature here and there.

• High-availability cluster. I designed the HA topology the shop runs on so a single node failing never takes the storefront offline. The trade-off was deliberate: I favoured a self-managed cluster over a fully managed PaaS to keep hosting economics sane for an independent business, and absorbed the operational cost of running it myself.
• ERP-to-storefront integration bridge. The core of the system. I built the bridge from scratch with the ERP as the single source of truth and real-time sync out to multiple storefronts — stock, pricing and catalogue changes propagate without manual re-entry. Keeping one authoritative system and syncing outward (rather than letting each storefront own its own truth) is what keeps 50K SKUs consistent across channels.
• Cross-domain delivery. Payment-gateway integrations, a custom CMS, and streaming media (web radio/TV and mobile broadcasting), plus the VPS/cloud infrastructure and the LAN/WAN security around it. When you run an independent platform, the boundary of “your job” is the whole stack.
• Team. I built and supported distributed dev teams around it — interviewing, mentoring, code review and the engineering standards that kept a long-lived codebase maintainable.

Impact

• 50,000+ SKUs across 37 categories, served from a single authoritative catalogue.
• Shipping to 70 countries.
• 15+ years continuously in production — a system that has outlived most of the frameworks it started with.
• Multiple storefronts driven from one ERP, with no manual catalogue reconciliation.