Tag: Ecommerce

Jamie Sutherland, CTO of Scottish e-commerce startup Mallzee, explains how the platform acts as both Tindr-style product aggregator and a predictive analytics tool for retail businesses. He also shares why machine learning is critical to Mallzee’s success.

Learn how Houtan Fanisalek, Chief Technology Officer of Felix Gray, an e-commerce startup, scaled their infrastructure and planned for massive traffic spikes using Amazon Aurora and Elasticache. He discusses best practices on how to scale your database with minimal downtime, find performance bottlenecks in your database driven application, and how to handle service failures gracefully. Houtan also provides real world examples of the challenges his team faced while scaling Felix Gray, and speaks to the common growing pains any tech startup will face as they scale in the cloud.

For shoppers who buy a mattress from Casper, all they have to do is hit the “place order” button and a few days later, a mattress shows up on their doorstep. Easy. But for Site Reliability Engineer John Spencer and the rest of his extended team, getting a mattress from order to delivery is a far more complicated process.

From the beginning, the Glossier team set out to build a great technology company. Creating a beauty brand was of course also necessary, but that almost seemed like table stakes, per Bryan Mahoney, Glossier’s Chief Technology Officer. What would set them apart was their ability to build and leverage tech to create a new customer experience centered around community discussion and discovery of products.

Based in Los Angeles, GOAT is the largest marketplace for buying and selling authenticated sneakers. Launched in 2015, the company was determined to create a safe and trusted place where both buyers and sellers could rest assured that their merchandise was 100% real and authenticated. Marko Vasiljevic, GOAT’s Director of Engineering, explains how they use AWS to scale their operations – particularly around Black Friday.

While most people know Rent the Runway as the country’s leading lender of LBDs and workwear, the nine-year old startup also happens to be the country’s largest dry-cleaning business. As Rent The Runway CTO Josh Builder notes, the company turns around, on average, 50,000 to 55,000 items on a daily basis—over 65,000 during peak seasons and holidays—and 100% of that inventory comes back to them.

As veritable stylists and dry-cleaning experts, Rent the Runway must keep track of not only the latest fashion trends, but also a wide variety of inventory and chemical mixes to keep their clothes in red-carpet shape. To do this, RTR is shifting many of their operations to the cloud. Watch to see how they pulled it off.