About Commercial Progression

It is focused on designing, developing, and supporting Drupal-powered websites. Their team of investigators finds meaningful insight and field knowledge to offer the best solution. They always help design and develop reliable and intuitive platforms that leverage open technology to find relevant information and present them in the hands of the people that shape future research.

Services

Mobile App Development Web Development VR App Development Enterprise App Modernization Chat Bots & AI Development Mobile App Design

Commercial Progression Reviews

Write a Review

Online store that handled our peak season traffic without a single outage

Minjun Oh / Director of Engineering - Sejong Digital Corp
Verified
Sep 30, 2025

Project summary: Our creative production workflow was entirely manual and we were spending more time on process administration than on ideas — automation was long overdue.

Our previous agency had given us a platform that worked well enough to demo and fell apart under real load. This team came in, diagnosed the root causes accurately, and rebuilt the critical components without disrupting the live service. The performance improvements were immediate and measurable — page load times dropped by 60 percent, error rates dropped to near zero, and our support team has far fewer incidents to deal with. The contrast with our previous experience could not have been sharper.

PROS

Engineering quality that our internal team can maintain without calling the vendor, thorough documentation, proactive risk identification throughout the project

CONS

The volume of quality documentation they produced was genuinely impressive but also meant our team needed dedicated time to review it properly — a minor process point, not a complaint

5.0
Overall
5.0
Quality
5.0
Schedule
5.0
Cost
5.0
Communication
Project TypeE-commerce Development
IndustryAdvertising & Marketing
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationJan 2025 – Nov 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As Director of Engineering at Sejong Digital Corp, I manage a cross-functional technology team serving our Advertising & Marketing clients from Busan, South Korea. We are a commercially focused organisation and every technology decision we make is evaluated against a clear business case. We needed a partner who understood that context, not just the technical brief.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our Advertising & Marketing regulatory environment had changed and the compliance timeline was non-negotiable. We needed to rebuild specific components of our system to meet the new requirements and our internal team was already fully committed to the core product roadmap. Bringing in a specialist E-commerce Development partner was the only realistic path.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The full E-commerce Development lifecycle from discovery through to production deployment and hypercare support. This included requirements workshops, solution architecture, sprint-based development, QA and automated testing, deployment to our cloud environment, and a structured handover with documentation. They also provided a brief post-launch period of dedicated support which was genuinely useful.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
A direct referral from a peer who had used them for a comparable E-commerce Development engagement in the Advertising & Marketing space. That peer's experience had been excellent and their project profile was similar enough to ours that the recommendation carried real weight. Everything we found during our own evaluation reinforced that this was the right decision.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Extremely well. They asked detailed questions, challenged vague requirements until they were specific, and proposed sensible defaults for decisions we had not yet made rather than just leaving them open. By the time development started there was no ambiguity in the backlog, which is a rare starting position.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
The project management was the best I have experienced in a vendor relationship. We had fortnightly sprint reviews with structured agendas, a shared backlog that we could inspect at any point, a risk register that was actively maintained rather than created at kickoff and never opened again, and a project manager who treated our time as something worth protecting. Communication was proactive, not reactive.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes on both counts. There was one sprint where a third-party integration took longer than scoped because of undocumented API behaviour on the vendor side. The team flagged it immediately, proposed two mitigation options, and we agreed on an approach that recovered the timeline within two weeks. That is how scope issues should be handled and rarely are.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Hard to isolate precisely because several factors changed simultaneously, but the data we can attribute directly to the new E-commerce Development platform shows a meaningful improvement in the metrics that matter to our Advertising & Marketing business. Our account managers report that the new capability is coming up positively in client conversations, which was one of the strategic objectives we started with.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The intellectual honesty. They told us when something we wanted was a bad idea and explained why. They told us when a timeline was tight and gave us options. They did not tell us what we wanted to hear in order to win work or avoid a difficult conversation. In a long engagement that kind of relationship is far more valuable than an agency that just says yes.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
I recommend them to anyone who asks and occasionally to people who do not. The combination of E-commerce Development expertise, Advertising & Marketing domain knowledge, and delivery discipline is genuinely difficult to find. We found it here and we intend to keep it.

SLA adherence that would embarrass most in-house departments in the best way

Charlotte Whitfield / Head of Digital Commerce - Sterling Retail PLC
Verified
Mar 29, 2023

Project summary: Our existing platform had grown organically over several years and the accumulated technical debt was beginning to affect both performance and our ability to ship new features.

Project governance was one of the things that impressed me most. We had a dedicated project manager who ran tight fortnightly sprints with clear acceptance criteria, a shared backlog that gave us full visibility at all times, and a change request process that was fair and transparent. Nothing slipped through the cracks, no bill shock at the end, and the final delivery matched the original scope document almost perfectly. In my experience that kind of discipline is genuinely uncommon.

PROS

Engineering quality that our internal team can maintain without calling the vendor, thorough documentation, proactive risk identification throughout the project

CONS

Honestly nothing worth documenting — we went in with high expectations and they were met on every measure

5.0
Overall
5.0
Quality
5.0
Schedule
5.0
Cost
5.0
Communication
Project TypeIT Managed Services
IndustryNonprofit & NGO
Project CostLess than $10,000
DurationAug 2025 – Jan 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Sterling Retail PLC is a Nonprofit & NGO business based in Manchester, UK. As Head of Digital Commerce I am responsible for all technology investment decisions, vendor selection, and ensuring our digital capabilities match our growth ambitions. We operate in a competitive market where the quality of our software directly affects our ability to win and retain clients.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
We had a product concept validated by market research but no clear path to build it within our budget and timeline constraints. Our Nonprofit & NGO competitors were moving quickly and we could not afford to spend eighteen months finding out a generalist agency could not execute the IT Managed Services work our product required.
What services did the company provide for your project?
End-to-end IT Managed Services delivery with a particular emphasis on the integration layer that connected the new build to our existing Nonprofit & NGO infrastructure. They also provided UI/UX input that was not in the original scope but which they offered proactively because they could see it would affect adoption. That kind of initiative was characteristic of how they approached the whole engagement.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
Their portfolio included two projects that were sufficiently close to our own brief in terms of complexity, IT Managed Services scope, and Nonprofit & NGO context that we felt confident they understood what we were asking. The proposal was technically rigorous, the pricing was transparent, and the proposed team structure gave us senior engineers throughout rather than just for the pitch.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we did at the start, which sounds like an exaggeration but is genuinely accurate. The discovery workshop they ran surfaced assumptions we had not examined and contradictions in our requirements that would have caused real problems mid-development. The functional specification they produced was the clearest articulation of our product that we had seen written down.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Professional and efficient. We used a shared project management tool that gave our stakeholders visibility without requiring them to attend every meeting. The project manager had a clear escalation path and used it appropriately. The only time I needed to intervene directly was when I chose to, not because something had been missed.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and within the agreed budget. They had given us a range estimate at the start, which I had been sceptical of, and they landed within the lower half of that range. Their estimation accuracy came from having broken the work down in genuine detail during discovery rather than giving a rough number and hoping. It showed in every sprint.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Quantitatively: user engagement metrics are up significantly since launch, our support ticket volume has dropped, and we have received unsolicited positive feedback from clients who noticed the improvement. Qualitatively: our internal team is proud of the product we now have, which affects morale and retention in ways that do not show up on a dashboard but matter enormously.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The quality of the written communication. This matters more than most clients articulate. Clear, concise, technically accurate updates that our non-technical stakeholders could read and understand. Proposals and change requests that made the decision obvious rather than obscuring it in jargon. That communication quality reduced our internal coordination overhead significantly.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes, without qualification. I have already made two direct referrals to peers in the Nonprofit & NGO sector who were facing similar IT Managed Services challenges. In both cases I gave the recommendation specifically because I was confident the experience would match what I described — which is a level of confidence I do not extend lightly.

Company Info

Founded 2008
Employees 10 - 49
Hourly Rate $150 - $199
Client Rating 5.0/5 (2 reviews)

Rating Breakdown

Quality
5.0
Schedule
5.0
Cost
5.0
Communication
5.0