CREA Empowers Global Retail Brands with a Seamless, Scalable E-commerce Solution on AWS

E-commerce is a multi-trillion-dollar global industry, and online transactions currently account for roughly one-quarter of all retail sales throughout Asia. Analysts at Morgan Stanley believe this figure will grow to 27 percent by 2026, creating massive opportunities for companies that support online retailers through marketing, branding, storefront operations, and order fulfillment technology.

CREA is an e-commerce software as a service (SaaS) provider in Southeast Asia that aims to make e-commerce effortless for brands across multiple channels. By combining innovative technology and e-commerce expertise, CREA helps brands remove the complexity of operating in a fragmented digital commerce landscape. The company maximizes opportunities by providing a single multi-channel solution called CREA Unified Selling Platform (CUSP). Leading groups like L’Oreal, Mars, Nestle, and over 80 others rely on CUSP for seamless, secure, and reliable integration with marketplaces and warehouses to fulfill their orders on time.

CREA chose to use AWS from the start, thanks to the platform’s user-friendly interface and global accessibility. The company recognized that AWS would provide cost-effective, secure, and scalable cloud infrastructure to support its ambitious growth plans. Within just two years of launching, CREA became a recognized partner for major e-commerce players and obtained the highest standards, such as the three-star certification from the Lazada Partners Program and the Premium Partner tier from Shopee. This was a testament to the strength of CREA’s innovative solutions, supporting best-in-class operations.

As CREA expanded to Malaysia and Singapore, the company worked closely with its dedicated AWS account managers to ensure seamless growth. This meant onboarding new international customers as well as handling vast fluctuations in traffic and online transactions.

CREA began with simple setups in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). Mickael Hoareau, chief technology officer at CREA, says, “Amazon EKS is just so easy to spin up. In combination with eksctl, which is a command line utility for creating and managing Kubernetes clusters, you can set up your whole cluster with a few clicks. You don't need a lot of know-how or people to maintain the cluster.”

As CREA’s e-commerce platform matured, Hoareau and his team began to explore other AWS services to help them scale and streamline its operations. “In Asia, a lot of sales campaigns are tied to double-digit dates, such as March 3 (3.3) and November 11 (11.11),” says Hoareau.

“Orders skyrocket at those times, so transactions scale up and down quickly. With AWS, we can effectively manage sudden spikes within minutes to fulfill a large volume of orders.” Moreover, CREA was able to quickly develop, test, and launch new ideas by utilizing various other AWS services. For example, by using AWS Lambda and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), the team was able to develop a customer chat dashboard in a few days. The dashboard is fully scalable, operates in real time, and can process up to 100,000 updates per second.

CREA also uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to manage lifecycle configuration and scale storage, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to test and add new features regularly, and Amazon API Gateway for a secure and efficient way to expose its APIs to customers. This allows the company to remain at the forefront of its industry and attract well-known international brands. Furthermore, by leveraging privacy safeguards and security controls on AWS, CREA ensures secure transactions, and achieves and exceeds privacy and compliance requirements globally—which was especially important as CREA expanded beyond Thailand’s borders.

Michael Schmidt, engineering manager at CREA, says, “The autoscaling setup from AWS is very convenient. With the click of a button, our system can handle large fluctuations in traffic and processing power.”

Since adopting AWS, CREA has experienced significant growth, expanding into a multi-million-dollar international company that onboards major retail brands like Blackmores to its platform. Thanks to the scalability and flexibility of the AWS Cloud infrastructure, CREA's platform can handle an increase in peak loads of over 15 times its previous daily volume.

The AWS pay-as-you-go pricing model has also been crucial in driving CREA's growth, allowing the company to scale its operations without worrying about infrastructure costs. This has helped CREA to focus on delivering high-quality solutions to its customers, while leaving infrastructure management to AWS. In addition, CREA has been able to optimize its cloud infrastructure through regular meetings with dedicated AWS account managers. This has resulted in substantial performance improvements—including a threefold increase in order syncing performance—and a 56 percent reduction in server costs.

“The team at AWS are not only technically proficient, but also objective and dedicated in helping their customers succeed,” Hoareau adds. “Our AWS account team provides valuable insights and guidance on how to improve software performance, reduce latency, and cut costs.”

The business is excited about the new AWS Asia Pacific (Bangkok) Region and the opportunities it presents for CREA's growth and expansion. Additionally, CREA plans to leverage AWS data analytics and machine learning technology to improve its offerings and stay ahead of the competition.

Despite its success and growth in new markets, CREA remains committed to maintaining a lean and agile team that can weather economic storms and pivot quickly as market conditions change. With AWS, CREA has been able to minimize costs while delivering high-quality solutions to its customers. Hoareau concludes, “As CREA continues to grow and expand, we will continue to rely on AWS for the flexibility, scalability, and reliability needed to succeed in the competitive world of e-commerce.”