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Yahoo Taiwan EC modernizes its e-commerce platform, accelerating launches by 30%
Learn how Yahoo Taiwan EC is modernizing on AWS to cut costs, accelerate launches, and prepare for AI-driven growth.
Overview
Yahoo Taiwan E-Commerce (Yahoo Taiwan EC) delivers millions of products to consumers across Taiwan. Operating with greater local autonomy since 2024, the company began modernizing its technology infrastructure to reduce costs, improve scalability, and strengthen its foundation for AI-driven innovation. By migrating its ecommerce platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Yahoo Taiwan EC has reported 30−40 percent lower operational savings and 30 percent faster time to market.
Benefits
30%+
lower operational costs30%
faster time to marketOpportunity | Unlocking e-commerce growth with modernization
Yahoo Taiwan EC is one of Taiwan’s most prominent online marketplaces, serving millions of consumers across diverse product categories.The company previously ran on Yahoo’s proprietary on-premises infrastructure, built for media rather than e-commerce. These systems drove up costs, limited scalability, and slowed innovation. Engineers also spent time managing specialized tools instead of building customer-facing features.
Gaining more local autonomy in 2024, Yahoo Taiwan EC saw the need to leave legacy infrastructure behind and adopt a modern, cloud-based foundation. Scaling during major shopping events such as 11.11 was particularly challenging, demanding costly overprovisioning of resources that sat idle most of the year.
Wei Min, Chief Technology Officer at Yahoo Taiwan EC, says,“We faced high operating costs and scalability limits on platforms not designed for e-commerce. We wanted a platform that could accelerate innovation and help us focus on application development instead of infrastructure.”
Using AWS, we can accelerate innovation in AI and big data, reduce costs, and deliver new capabilities to customers much faster.
Wei Min,
Chief Technology Officer, Yahoo Taiwan E-CommerceSolution | Migrating 10,000 vCPUs with AWS and a container-first strategy
In March 2025, Yahoo Taiwan EC began a three-year engagement with AWS to decommission its on-premises data center and modernize its e-commerce platform. The scope of the program involves migrating about 10,000 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) by November 2025.
To make this shift, the company adopted a “containerize everything” strategy. By running workloads on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Yahoo Taiwan EC standardized how applications are deployed across teams, gained flexibility to scale services quickly, and reduced reliance on aging proprietary infrastructure.
The company’s first priority was Vespa, the core search engine that powers product discovery. Yahoo Taiwan EC began proof of concept (PoC) testing in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region. AWS solution architects provided design reviews, risk assessments, and migration blueprints which helped accelerate the PoC process. Once the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region launched in June 2025, the Yahoo Taiwan EC team shifted workloads there to ensure low latency and proximity to users. This staged approach helped the team migrate tier by tier, with fallback options at every step to prevent disruption.
To replace in-house systems, Yahoo Taiwan EC used Amazon SageMaker to manage machine learning (ML) models, improving speed and reliability for AI development. It also deployed Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon DynamoDB to support large promotion events like flash sales, and Amazon OpenSearch Service to enhance data indexing and analytics capabilities.
The AWS team worked closely with Yahoo Taiwan EC’s engineers throughout the process, providing cost-optimization strategies, expert guidance, and hands-on training to accelerate the company’s adoption of cloud-native practices. As part of these sessions, the AWS team also shared best practices for using large language models (LLMs) to improve AI-driven capabilities across Yahoo Taiwan EC’s platform.
Outcome | Achieving 30–40% savings and 30% faster time to market
By August 2025, Yahoo Taiwan EC had migrated about 2,000 vCPUs to AWS. Although migration is still underway, the company is already reporting 30–40% operational savings across platform development, data center operations, and infrastructure. Time to market has improved by 30% by removing hardware procurement bottlenecks.
Running workloads in the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region has also strengthened Yahoo Taiwan EC’s ability to scale during major events like 11.11, helping ensure reliable performance without costly overprovisioning. Engineers now focus more on building new features and less time on managing infrastructure.
Once Yahoo Taiwan EC completes the migration of 10,000 vCPUs, it plans to deepen its use of AI and ML, expanding on Amazon SageMaker. “Using AWS, we can accelerate innovation in AI and big data, reduce costs, and deliver new capabilities to customers much faster,” Wei Min concludes.
About Yahoo Taiwan E-Commerce
Yahoo Taiwan E-Commerce (Yahoo Taiwan EC) is one of Taiwan’s leading online retail platforms, offering a wide range of products across categories such as fashion, electronics, beauty, and daily essentials. Since launching in 1999 and later merging with Kimo in 2001, Yahoo Taiwan has become a trusted destination for digital shopping.
Disclaimer: Amazon Web Services currently deploys the aforementioned certain generative AI-related services in Global regions. Amazon Web Services China region services are operated by NWCD and Sinnet, with more details at the official Amazon Web Services China region website.
