Panda Retail Company scales online grocery orders by 19x on AWS

For many years, an extensive network of physical stores has driven Panda’s success. But as demand for online shopping accelerated, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, the retailer recognized the need to strengthen its digital commerce capabilities.

By acquiring a local grocery delivery application, Panda could respond rapidly to evolving customer needs. But the application infrastructure wasn’t designed for long-term growth. So the company needed a more scalable and reliable architecture to support increasing traffic volumes, operational efficiency, and a consistent customer experience.

To implement its long-term ecommerce strategy, Panda set out to modernize its digital platform. The company turned to AWS to establish a technology foundation that would lay the groundwork for innovation, agility, and expansion.

Working alongside AWS, Panda modernized its ecommerce architecture to create a scalable, reliable, and high-performing platform in the cloud. The company strengthened its digital environment by incorporating critical business systems, enhancing application visibility, and improving operational monitoring. “Ecommerce is a strategic growth engine that helps us provide greater convenience and value for customers while supporting our long-term ambitions,” says Ahmad Chehade, chief marketing officer at Panda.

The retailer runs its application and backend services on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service. Using Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL, a relational database service, Panda supports transactional data, and using Amazon CloudFront, the company can securely deliver content with low latency. To gain visibility into performance, availability, and security, Panda adopted Amazon CloudWatch to observe and optimize workloads.

“Our objective was to build an ecommerce platform that could continually evolve alongside our customers’ expectations,” says Majed Sidani, director of ecommerce at Panda. “By modernizing our architecture on AWS, we established a scalable foundation that supports growth, accelerates innovation, and helps us deliver a better online shopping experience.”

The results of Panda’s ecommerce transformation have been significant. Over 48 months, daily online orders increased by 19 times, from 720 to about 14,000, demonstrating Panda’s ability to scale with demand. The platform’s production internet layer achieved a non-5xx success rate of around 99.99 percent, as observed by AWS. During a recent 30-day period, the environment processed more than 278 million requests at an average response time of about 80 ms.

Using managed services on AWS, Panda can deploy changes more frequently and monitor performance more effectively. Teams can focus on introducing new capabilities and future initiatives in personalization, advanced analytics, and intelligent retail experiences.

Today, the company is well positioned to advance its digital commerce strategy while maintaining strong operational performance. With the new foundation, Panda can support continuous innovation and deliver greater value to customers across Saudi Arabia.

“By investing in scalable digital features, we are strengthening customer engagement and building a platform that drives long-term growth,” says Chehade.