Architect high-performance retail and e-commerce applications that scale with demand
Legacy technologies, including relational databases, are unable to keep up with the challenges in meeting the performance, scalability, availability, agility, and affordability requirements of their applications. With increased pressure to deliver speedy, contextualized, and omnichannel shopping experiences, retailers are leveraging Couchbase’s NoSQL database to move away from monolithic solutions to microservice-based architectures so they can build engaging, responsive, and scalable applications.
Customer success spotlight
Global fashion giant Tommy Hilfiger reduced buying trip duration 66% with innovative virtual showrooms powered by Couchbase.
Learn more
Tesco, the world’s third-largest retailer, easily and inexpensively scales Couchbase to support Customer 360 and Catalog & Inventory solutions, with 10M products and 35K requests per second.
Learn moreWhy Couchbase NoSQL for retail and e-commerce
Scale: Easier, more affordable scalability
Couchbase’s network-centric architecture with a high-performance replication backbone allows the database to be easily extended while maintaining performance at scale. Unlike relational databases like Oracle and MySQL, with Couchbase you can meet any demand, including peak traffic events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and linearly scale easily and without disruption. Couchbase supports growing browse-to-buy ratios and powers conversion rate optimization.
Performance: Better performance and higher availability than any other database
While other NoSQL databases like MongoDB™ require a third-party cache – adding to both cost and complexity – Couchbase has a fully integrated read-through and write-through caching layer. Couchbase’s memory- and network-centric architecture consistently delivers the sub-millisecond responsiveness that today’s shoppers expect.
Availability: Built-in high availability and disaster recovery
Couchbase provides five-nines availability with built-in high availability and flexible cross data center replication (XDCR) capabilities that supports disaster recovery and data locality requirements. Couchbase also supports store partitioning, allowing a store to continue to operate even if it partitions from the global network. With Couchbase, you have full control over the topology – unidirectional, bidirectional, or any configuration you need.
Flexibility: Lower costs and faster time to market
Couchbase drives the flexibility and increased operational efficiency you need to not only get your retail applications deployed quickly, but to keep up with the constantly changing data (products, catalogs, inventory, and more) in those applications. Couchbase’s powerful query language allows developers to easily query JSON data using familiar, SQL-like expressions. Tightly integrated full-text search, real-time analytics, and powerful eventing services make it easy to add new features to your application on the fly without moving data into and managing dozens of database technologies, finally putting an end to database sprawl.
Mobile: Integrated mobile capabilities support omnichannel experiences
Couchbase is the only NoSQL database that supports interactions online, in store, or on the go. Couchbase Mobile extends Couchbase Server to the edge with an embedded NoSQL database (Couchbase Lite) and a web gateway (Sync Gateway), enabling use cases such as in-store personalized apps, point of sale systems, real-time coupons and rewards, and mobile retail catalogs.
Industry use cases & solutions
Shopping cart
Facilitate purchases and avoid cart abandonment with seamless performance at scale for search, shopping cart, and checkout.
Session store
Manage critical session data in real time to monitor user stats, maintain security, track behavior, place ads, and more.
Product/price catalog
Support and scale multiple data structures like SKUs, product and accounting hierarchies, GTINs, barcodes, and ISBNs.
Personalization
Capture omnichannel engagements and provide personalized real-time updates and offers at every customer touchpoint.
Mobile wallet
Power a mobile wallet app that provides reservation details, loyalty club information, user profile data, and more.
Click & Collect
Support customer preferences for flexible and cost-effective online purchases with in-store pickup.
Loyalty program
Pull data from various sources to build, track, and maintain a loyalty program with digital coupon management.
User profile
Deliver fast, seamless, and highly scalable login, authentication, and profile management that supports user preferences.
Recommend in real time
Provide effective real-time suggestions for upsells, cross-sells, and recommended products online and in mobile applications.
Mainframe offload
Improve response times and substantially lower costs by caching frequently used data and reducing workloads.
Customer 360
Power omnichannel experiences across web, mobile, and in-store interactions and personalization for loyalty programs, customer service applications, and more.
Catalog & inventory management
Deliver optimized experiences with dynamically changing product/pricing portfolios, shopping cart, and catalog data.
Field service
Give employees the ability to collect purchase information, service customers, and get real-time merchandise status on their mobile devices.
IoT data management
Leverage IoT devices to deliver personalized offers to shoppers in real time, collect customer data, and more.
Related resources
![]()
Whitepaper
![]()
Blogs & Videos
- Scaling a Couchbase cluster for increasing and decreasing demand
- Supporting Black Friday with Couchbase
- See how eBay uses 1,000+ nodes of Couchbase for peak performance
- Couchbase high availability and disaster recovery: Setting up XDCR step by step
- Next level high availability with Couchbase Server 5.5
- See the digital showroom Tommy Hilfiger built on top of Couchbase Mobile
