Selling alcohol online is not a catalogue problem. Whether you may complete an order depends on where the customer is, and getting that wrong is a licence issue.
An ordinary store optimises for completing every order. This one has to reliably stop some of them.
Restrictions vary by country, state and sometimes by product category. That check belongs at the point of address entry, not in a fulfilment email the next morning.
A gate baked into a cached page is either shown to everybody forever or to nobody. Verification state is resolved per visitor on top of a shared cached page.
A product that cannot ship to a customer's region should not appear purchasable to them. Catalogue visibility is keyed by destination rather than uniform.
A limited release brings a concentrated rush on one product. That is inventory contention on a single row, not general traffic.
Demonstrating that restricted orders were declined matters as much as the ones you took. Those decisions are recorded and retained.
Ordinary ecommerce tuning assumes one catalogue and one set of rules. Here both change with the delivery address, and caching has to respect that.
The expensive failure here is not a slow page. It is an order accepted for a destination you are not licensed to ship to.
Every row exists because the correct response depends on the delivery address, which is the assumption caching would rather not make.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Restriction checks | Applied at address entry, before payment is taken | Discovering at fulfilment that an order cannot legally ship means refunding a completed sale and explaining why, rather than declining it cleanly. |
| Age verification state | Resolved per visitor above a shared cached page | A gate baked into the cached response is fixed as either passed or unpassed for everyone, so one of those groups gets the wrong behaviour. |
| Catalogue visibility | Keyed by destination rather than served uniformly | Showing a product as purchasable to somebody you cannot ship it to generates an order you have to reverse and a customer you have annoyed. |
| Limited release handling | Inventory contention managed on the individual product | An allocation drop concentrates hundreds of buyers on one stock row within minutes, which is a locking problem rather than a traffic one. |
| Declined order records | Retained alongside completed ones | Showing that restricted orders were refused is part of demonstrating compliance, and it only exists if the refusals were written down. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Move the store across — migration is free, shipping rules reviewed.