11Street Builds Low-Latency, Live Commerce Interactive Shopping Solution on AWS

South Korea’s ecommerce market has seen explosive growth in recent years, with online shopping now surpassing sales at brick-and-mortar stores. A major player catering to this growth is 11Street, South Korea’s largest ecommerce site with 47 million members. The company was launched in 2008 by SK Group, a South Korean conglomerate. In 2021, it teamed up with Amazon to offer customers in Korea access to global brands and products on the Amazon.com platform.

11Street’s mission is to provide innovative services that promote an enjoyable, convenient shopping experience for both consumers and vendors. Personalization through a modern recommendation engine and user-generated video product reviews are among its offerings. The ecommerce giant recently introduced a live commerce feature that blends entertainment with instant purchasing. Live commerce combines real-time video streaming to sell a featured product with audience participation, typically through a chat function or reaction buttons.

11Street was using a streaming solution from a third-party vendor to deliver its live commerce feature but faced limitations on capacity and two-way communication capabilities. The solution was running in an on-premises infrastructure. Scaling the platform to meet traffic spikes ahead of sales events or new product launches was also a challenge, due to the inability to accurately estimate traffic volume. As a result, customers would experience lags or downtime during live broadcasts.

The company decided to bring its live commerce solution in-house to gain control over the service as it expanded and enriched two-way communication on the channel. It was also looking to improve data processing and analytics capabilities, using the vast amount of data collected from 11Street members and their use of shopping coupons. Based on these goals, 11Street elected to build out and relaunch its live commerce feature on the cloud.

11Street evaluated cloud-based live-streaming alternatives, comparing average latency, cost, feature sets, and available integrations. It decided to build the solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its range of video-on-demand capabilities and ease of integration with compute and storage infrastructure.

11Street chose Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) as a managed live streaming solution, based on the service’s ultra-low latency and high-quality live video function. Amazon IVS also has the potential to integrate interactive experiences across Android, iOS, and Web Player software development kit (SDK) mobile platforms. Because the service works as an “out of the box” solution, 11Street can create and configure live streams in just a few clicks, without the need for specialized video expertise. 11Street can also build engaging and interactive experiences alongside live video through the timed metadata function in Amazon IVS.

In addition to Amazon IVS, 11Street is using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for scalable, cost-effective storage and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to automate database administration. With the migration to AWS and by leveraging the discounted pricing option for Amazon IVS, 11Street is saving at least 50 percent on infrastructure cost to run its live streaming application compared to its previous solution.

The in-house streaming solution, dubbed LIVE11, relies on Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) to securely stream messaging and video data between its platform and viewers. The solution also takes advantage of Amazon ElastiCache as a fully managed, real-time caching service. With integrated video and data services, the LIVE11 solution on AWS provides latency of 3 seconds or less.

Because Amazon IVS is a fully managed service natively integrated with other AWS tools, 11Street could quickly launch LIVE11 by saving time on infrastructure configuration and development. The support of AWS solutions architects was likewise instrumental for a smooth development and launch experience.

“We were able to develop our live commerce service quickly using the intuitive AWS multi-platform SDK and with technical support from AWS solution architects. This allowed us to focus on improving the service quality of 11Street rather than worrying about infrastructure,” says the LIVE11 development team. “In addition, we can seamlessly offer our LIVE11 video-on-demand services by leveraging the auto-record to Amazon S3 feature in Amazon IVS, with our content automatically stored in Amazon S3.”

11Street has also solved its scalability challenges by using autoscaling features on AWS. With autoscaling and Amazon IVS, LIVE11 can scale on demand to ensure a consistent shopping experience. During the 2021 “11Street Festival Day”—an event that’s held during the first 11 days of November and is known for high levels of shopping and retail traffic—LIVE11 recorded 36 million cumulative views. This figure far exceeded the 140,000 views recorded in 2020.

With the ease of configuring live streams on AWS, 11Street increased the number of live streams presented during the 2021 “11Street Festival Day” by threefold. In 2020, the company featured 42 live commerce streams; in 2021, that number rose to 121.

In conclusion, the LIVE11 development team comments, “Amazon IVS is optimized for low-latency live streaming and can be quickly deployed without targeted expertise. It was very convenient for our team to develop 11Street's interactive features thanks to the flexibility of AWS solutions and the support of AWS solutions architects.”

To learn more, visit Media Services on AWS.