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MongoDB for Retail Innovation

Build modern consumer experiences and make your data work for your business and your customers.
Is your ecommerce search ready for AI?
Run a green data retail operation
From the eco-friendliness of product packaging, to the intricacies of resource-intensive supply chains, today’s retailers are faced with optimizing resources and carbon emissions while also continuing to align for sales growth and profitability.Read the Ebook
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Transform retail customer experiences

Essential elements to ecommerce modernization

Essential elements to ecommerce modernization

Dive into this paper to traverse seven key pillars to providing experiences modern retail consumers have come to love and expect from the businesses they trust.Deliver a modern ecommerce application
Digital differentiation matters in retail

Digital differentiation matters in retail

Customers want personalized experiences. MongoDB partners with Google Cloud to help retailers differentiate themselves from their competition by collecting relevant data, mining it for insights, and using it to deliver delightful customer experiences.Explore data-driven innovations
Manage product catalog data with ease

Manage product catalog data with ease

For a seamless digital, in-person, or omnichannel experience, retail data should be consistent and available in real time across all devices from ecommerce websites to customer-facing applications, and in-store workforce applications.Explore product catalog modernization

Ecommerce and Retail Data Solutions

Build a competitive advantage with MongoDB
Retail data at the edge

Retail data at the edge

Unlock the power of edge computing in retail with Atlas for the Edge. Achieve real-time, omnichannel shopping, streamline logistics, and achieve end-to-end visibility across point-of-sale devices, inventory management devices, employee apps, warehouses, and more.

mdb_cross-platform

Omnichannel Catalog

Omnichannel product catalog and inventory management in real time, in the same data store with informed recommendations.

general_action_view

Seamless Shopping

Sync what your customers see—whether on the web or in the store—across channels and with your back-end systems to create seamless, endless aisle shopping.

general_features_data_analytics

Real-time Intelligence

Easily build and use rich customer profiles by leveraging new types of data that are too complex for relational databases to handle, such as “social footprints.”

atlas_active_dashboard

Resilient Supply Chain

Develop a holistic view of your businesses so you can support omnichannel initiatives, aggregate inventory updates, and act on trends in real time.

general_features_transactions

Payments

Respond to changing customer and merchant expectations with the agility enabled both by MongoDB’s JSON document model and flexible schemas.

industry_retail

Personalization

Build an in-store personalization engine with intelligent devices that cater to customers and recommend merchandise based on detailed activity and purchase data.


Industry Accelerator Program

Learn about our mission-critical solution accelerators – from industry innovation days, access passes, and jumpstart programs – that drive industry innovation.
Learn more
YEAR-ROUND INNOVATION
“Microservices are not a silver bullet. For Ulta Beauty, the biggest challenge was how to break up a monolithic environment into multiple applications. We had to evolve our core systems without impacting today’s services.”
Sethu Madhav Vure
IT Architect, Ulta Beauty
Watch the video
CRISIS MANAGEMENT IN RETAIL
“The way we’ve had to work during COVID – quickly, with agile development is how we’ll have to work as we accelerate our digital transformation. I expect us to be making more use of MongoDB in the next 12 months.”
Steve Westgarth
Head of Engineering, Boots UK
MOBILE WORKFORCE SOLUTIONS
"What we’ve created is really innovative. Since rolling the application built on MongoDB Realm out to all 8,500 stores in North America, we’ve been able to sync data across more than 20,000 devices on a nearly real-time basis.”
Srikanth Gandra
Director of Digital Technology, 7-Eleven
TRUSTED BY
7-Eleven logo
Otto logo
Leroy Merlin logo
Ulta Beauty logo

Learn more

Get valuable insights on how to leverage MongoDB for Retail.
View More Resources
Why It’s So Hard for Retailers to Build a Workforce Enablement Application
Why It’s So Hard for Retailers to Build a Workforce Enablement Application
Enabling retail workers with real-time data via a mobile app improves employee productivity, happiness, and retention, while transforming and improving customer experiences. Start empowering your frontline retail workforce.
Download the White Paper
MongoDB for Retail and Ecommerce

MongoDB for Retail and Ecommerce

Do you have a specific question for our experts? What are you trying to build with your team? We’re here to help. Let’s get started.Contact Us

Retail Industry FAQs

The questions most retailers ask MongoDB
How is MongoDB being used in the retail industry today?

The retail industry is MongoDB’s second largest customer base; we work with all the big names in fashion, grocery, CPG (consumer packaged goods), and more.

As MongoDB is a general purpose database, we are embedded in many different types of applications. One of the most common areas is ecommerce modernization, where retailers want to move from a legacy monolith on-premises system to a modern microservices architecture in the cloud. MongoDB is a great solution as it enables rapid development through an intuitive, flexible document model and its cloud native architecture gives the availability and resilience to provide a reliable 24/7 service.

In recent years, there are more and more supply chain use cases: To optimize processes, give end-to-end visibility, or to enable omnichannel experiences. Being able to unite disparate data sets and surface them for real time consumption across organizations is vital for understanding the flow of stock and inventory.

What’s the best database for retail product catalog modernization?

Product catalogs are probably our most common use case in retail because our document model maps intuitively to the data set. The product on the shelf becomes an object in code, and that then becomes a document in MongoDB. This reduces complexity and improves performance compared to a relational structure.

MongoDB’s flexible document data model easily allows for product data to change over time so new products can be brought to market quickly. Also, data of different shapes can easily co-exist (think of a retailer selling everything from lemons to mobile phones) and storing hierarchical data (e.g. product families) is much less complex in a NoSQL structure. This makes MongoDB ideal for product use cases.

Learn how some of our top customers are modernizing their product catalogs with MongoDB.
What are the most important omnichannel retail customer experiences today, and how can MongoDB help?

Customer expectations are constantly growing and evolving in this space. Digitally driven experiences like curbside pick-up and next-day delivery are now considered standard practices, but these are not easy to deliver if you’re an established retailer with decades of technical debt and siloed data stores.

Coupled with this, technology-forward retailers are taking market share by offering new experiences. For example, in-store staff gain the ability to access loyalty accounts at the register and offer customized offers or gifts in real time.

For any one of these experiences, retailers need to have a single view of stock, inventory, and the customer available in real time. Creating an operational data layer in MongoDB can be a great solution for this. By combining data in a performant and flexible manner, it becomes easy to create these new experiences.

Break Down Silos with a Data Mesh Approach to Omnichannel Retail
How does MongoDB differ from competing retail databases?

There are two main groups of databases that we compete with in the retail space.

One is traditional RDBMS; Oracle, or even the likes of MySQL, Postgres, etc. Retailers will have established skill sets in these technologies, but will often choose to modernize onto NoSQL technology. This is because the rigid structure of RDBMS inhibits change. The schema must be changed for every new product or attribute of a customer that will be added, which slows down time to market. These technologies are also not built for the cloud, their architecture of active-passive is designed for a data center and does not provide the resilience and availability that is required for a 24/7 always-on service. For ecommerce where downtime costs revenue, this is unacceptable.

The second is other NoSQL database services that are available in the cloud. The document model and always-on service is appealing, but many of these lack vital functionality. Some are merely key-value stores incapable of answering complex queries, and with no secondary indexing capabilities they cannot serve multiple workloads performantly, or do not have the necessary data types (e.g. Decimal128 for dynamic pricing). We may see retailers begin on these services and then move to MongoDB when they realize their requirements are not being met by other databases. A great example of this is the ability in MongoDB to do in-app analytics. Our aggregation pipeline means that you can run simple analytics in the database in real time and perform complex transformations.

Application-Driven Analytics: In-App and Real-Time Insights for Retailers
How can a database help provide personalization in the retail industry?
The ability to provide personalized experiences is vital to capture the attention of the customer and show them what they want. MongoDB’s ability to do real-time analytics in the operational data layer means that retailers can build applications that are reacting in real time to what the customer is doing. For example, personalized product recommendations, offers, dynamic pricing, and more. Retailers are realizing that if they have to ETL data off to another system, then they are acting on data that is stale and the customer has moved on.
Read the use case from OTTO
How can MongoDB be used for customer and workforce mobile applications?

Almost all retailers run and develop several mobile applications: customer facing ones (e.g., ecommerce, loyalty) and internal workforce apps (e.g., inventory management, delivery/routing). These applications often need to sync to the backend data or have an offline mode (e.g., delivery drivers in remote areas or the fridge area of a warehouse).

Building this sync or offline mode is incredibly complex for retailers, and it’s not value-add work. It’s standard functionality. For this reason, MongoDB Realm is a great solution. Our flexible sync offering has out-of-the-box offline mode and data sync built in. We are now a common choice for functionality like in-app grocery shopping lists or inventory management mobile applications.

Learn how 7-Eleven built an Inventory Management App on MongoDB Realm
Retailers often talk about moving towards a “MACH” architecture. What is this and where does MongoDB fit in?

The MACH Alliance is a non-profit organization fostering the adoption of composable architecture principles. It stands for Microservices, API-First, Cloud-Native SaaS and Headless. The MACH Alliance’s Manifesto is to: “Future proof enterprise technology and propel current and future digital experiences." The MACH Alliance and the creation of this set of principles originated in the Retail Industry. Several of the five co-founders of the MACH Alliance are technology companies building for retail use cases: for example commercetools is a composable commerce platform for retail (built completely on MongoDB). MongoDB has been a member of the MACH Alliance since 2020, as an “enabler” member, meaning use of our technology can enable the implementation of the MACH principles in application architectures. This is because a data layer built on MongoDB is ideal as the basis for a MACH architecture.

Learn more about the MACH Alliance