Empowering Overseas Standalone Websites and Increasing Popularity Using AWS with POP MART

POP MART, founded in 2010, is a trendy culture and entertainment company. As disclosed in POP MART’s latest annual report for 2022, the number of POP MART stores in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and overseas reached 43, and the number of online stores reached 120 (these numbers include joint ventures and franchises). The number of cross-border e-commerce sites reached 13.

Amazon Web Services has many service nodes around the world and uses independent fiber optic cables for communication between resources—a network advantage that is of great significance to POP MART’s online shopping business. In addition, AWS has cutting-edge security and compliance practices. It is very suitable for POP MART’s online mall to operate in many different countries and regions around the world, and AWS’s practices fit well with the need for its website services to comply with local legal requirements. Amazon Web Services also has database capabilities that POP MART needs. Because of Amazon Web Services’s ability to fulfill the company’s goal of security, stability and cost control, POP MART chose AWS to build its online store.

As a global enterprise, POP MART has brick-and-mortar stores in many countries in Europe, America, Asia–Pacific, and other regions, and online stores also need to be deployed for the same regions. Because Amazon Web Services operates 99 Availability Zones in 31 geographic regions around the world, it can support POP MART’s current North American online shopping site and two different global online shopping sites, and it can scale with ease. Expanding business using Amazon Web Services was an obvious decision for POP MART, and as of October 2023, all of POP MART’s overseas online shopping sites are running on Amazon Web Services.

It is important to comply with local regulations in different countries and regions. Services offered by Amazon Web Services are certified to 98 security and compliance standards, including ISO. All 117 services provided by Amazon Web Services that store customer data can encrypt such data, meeting the compliance needs of virtually all global regulatory agencies. Users can access their data directly, thus effectively reducing POP MART’s audit costs.

The business nature of POP MART requires a robust database. Therefore, for its website, POP MART chose Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL—which is used to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud with just a few clicks—and Amazon Aurora, which provides high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. These services work well for e-commerce transactions and product inventory, verifying that POP MART’s online store can run smoothly without changing the established technical architecture. In addition, Amazon ElastiCache—a fully managed, Redis- and Memcached-compatible service—maintains scalability and near-real-time responsiveness. It effectively records logs and keeps everything under control.

Using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes in the Amazon Web Services and on-premises data centers, POP MART can complete container learning and deployment in a relatively short period of time. It gains a 10-percent savings in labor and time costs in this area as well. (See Figure 1: Architecture Diagram of POP MART on Amazon Web Services.)

“Using Amazon Web Services, our compliance cycle is significantly shortened, and labor and time costs are reduced by 10 percent compared to our previous solution,” says Xie Pengcheng, director of operations and maintenance at POP MART.

The Amazon Web Services team also advised POP MART in different aspects such as data compliance, multi-service integration, and encryption of sensitive user information. The team helped POP MART determine ideas for using the container technology and quickly realize the cloud migration.

Using Amazon Web Services, POP MART eliminated unnecessary communication audit costs related to overseas security compliance in the process of building an overseas standalone website. Additionally, it significantly shortened the project compliance cycle. By completing the deployment and operation of the global online store at a lower cost, POP MART has expanded its own enterprise scale and achieved greater efficiency.

The company has also answered the question of how Chinese consumer brands choose to go abroad. The success of POP MART’s global online store is a good model for many Chinese e-commerce enterprises who want to develop a broader market by building their own websites.

Using Amazon Web Services, POP MART hopes to further promote its company goal: to light up passion and bring joy.

In the future, POP MART will continue to use Amazon Web Services for more exploration in machine learning and consumer-oriented business and to provide quality services to more users worldwide.

“The services are running well and meet our business needs,” says Pengcheng. “Amazon Web Services is an efficient choice for enterprises to carry out global business.”

Beijing POP MART Culture and Creativity Co. (POP MART), founded in 2010, is a trendy culture and entertainment company in China. By the end of 2022, POP MART had more than 400 physical stores and 2,000 online stores worldwide, with more than 4,000 employees. With the brand goal to light up passion and bring joy, POP MART has built an integrated solution covering the whole industry chain of pop toys around five areas: attracting global artists, operating intellectual properties, appealing to consumers, promoting pop toy culture, and fostering innovative business.