OTTO, Germany’s Largest Online Retailer for Fashion and Lifestyle, Powers its eCommerce Platform with MongoDB
Next Generation Database Technology Provides Ideal Solution to Meet German Company’s Long-term Needs
London and Hamburg, 3rd June 2014 - MongoDB today announced that OTTO, selected MongoDB, the database for modern applications, to streamline its eCommerce platform, Otto.de, thereby providing more than one million visitors per day with an excellent online experience that supports OTTO’s revenue growth goals.
OTTO is Germany's number one eCommerce fashion and lifestyle company, currently turning over 2.27 billion Euros per year. In order to provide a more timely and personalised service to its growing customer base, OTTO decided to revamp its eCommerce platform. After an extensive search and multiple trial efforts, the German retailer selected MongoDB as its database of choice based on its flexibility, scalability and real-time performance capabilities.
In order to meet the needs of the digitally-oriented consumer, OTTO needed to be more targeted, with daily refreshed product information and promotional offerings allowing them to provide a more refined customer experience. MongoDB enabled OTTO to do this through a flexible data model, powerful in database analytics and a highly scalable, robust architecture.
The company developed its newly released intelligent eCommerce platform entirely in-house, with MongoDB as a key component. The new Otto.de now allows the eCommerce retailer to continually update over two million products immediately, ensuring that new products and promotions are made available to customers faster and in a more personalised way. Using MongoDB, this updated process can be achieved in less than 15 minutes.
Peter Wolter, head of eCommerce solutions and technology at OTTO commented: “OTTO is an established, respected retailer with 65 years of history. Customers are at the heart of our strategy. We always want to be at the forefront of an increasingly competitive online trading market, providing a superior online customer experience. We opted for MongoDB because it has high availability and can scale up to meet the needs of our business and today’s digital consumer.”
The most critical feature of MongoDB, which enables much-needed personalisation, is its dynamic schema. MongoDB’s dynamic schema allows OTTO to easily accommodate rich and highly variable structures. Powerful, native analytics within MongoDB provides OTTO with real-time insight to profile visitors, enabling the delivery of personalised experiences and targeted offers. MongoDB’s automatic sharding and replica sets allow OTTO to scale its eCommerce store with continuous availability as it acquires new customers and adds more products.
The development and operations teams at OTTO engaged with MongoDB consultants at the very start of the project and then through key development and testing milestones to ensure key requirements were being met. OTTO uses the MongoDB subscriptions to provide proactive, consultative support in addition to advanced management tools, disaster recovery and enterprise-grade security.
Peter Wolter highlighted: "With MongoDB, we chose a partner who could really support us in this process with consultants helping us in both design and training. As a result, we have a modern, digitally-oriented application development environment which will allow us to implement our innovative ideas as quickly as we create them. We have made the right decision in opting for the fastest-growing database community in MongoDB.”
Resources
● Watch a video to learn more about how OTTO is using MongoDB
● Learn more about why MongoDB works well for retail
● Register today for a MongoDB webinar series on „Omni-Channel Retailing“
Additionally, to learn more about new retail challenges and how MongoDB addresses them, download the white paper below:
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About OTTO
The single company OTTO has its headquarters in Hamburg and employs around 4,350 people. Sales in the 2013/14 financial year amounted to 2.27 billion euros. OTTO now generates around 80 per cent of total sales through otto.de and additional specialist online shops. Part of the Otto Group, OTTO is the largest online retailer for end consumer fashion and lifestyle in Germany, and the second-largest B2C online retailer altogether.
Werner Otto founded the OTTO company in 1949 and it is still under family ownership today. Dr Michael Otto, son of the company founder and for many years Chairman of the Executive Board, has developed the Otto-Versand mail order company at the time into the internationally active retail and service group, Otto Group, with 123 companies in 20 countries. Today the single company OTTO is managed by the three Management Board Members: Dr Michael Heller (OTTO Management Board, Categories), Marc Opelt (OTTO Management Board, Marketing & Sales) and Petra Scharner-Wolff (OTTO Management Board, Services).