New Aim improves performance by 85% with MongoDB Atlas

INTRODUCTION

Founded in Melbourne in 2005, New Aim started as an eBay seller. Over the years, it grew into one of Australia’s largest private ecommerce technology companies, selling products through more than 35 major retailers including Myer, Big W, and Woolworths.

In 2012, New Aim built and launched its proprietary marketplace, Dropshipzone, which is used by more than 2,500 small and medium retailers across Australia and New Zealand. Dropshipzone removes the complexities of managing inventory and supply chain operations by connecting suppliers, retailers, and end customers in a seamless ecosystem. Dropshipzone also helps retailers to quickly scale and grow.

“As a technology company, data is core to everything we do,” said John Barkle, General Manager of Dropshipzone. “We have a team of 40 experts focused on building, maintaining, and innovating around the platform.”

Working with MongoDB—first through the MongoDB Community Edition, and later in 2024 through a migration to MongoDB Atlas—has been instrumental to New Aim’s growth.

“Moving to MongoDB Atlas gave us access to a fully managed, flexible database. It helped us manage data more efficiently, and remove complexity,” said Barkle.

THE CHALLENGE

Unlocking scale and flexibility

New Aim built Dropshipzone on the Community Edition of MongoDB, which came with the eCommerce solution Magento (now Adobe Commerce). Building Dropshipzone on MonogDB Community Edition allowed the team to take advantage of MongoDB's document model, and quickly build an incredibly innovative platform.

In the next decade, however, Dropshipzone experienced constant growth, which came with significant challenges:

• Scaling requirements: New Aim offers products across more than 40 channels, including online stores, marketplaces, and omnichannel retailers. Over 200 suppliers are contributing to the New AIm marketplace today, and the number of SKUs it lists is over 100,000.
• A complex data architecture: New Aim’s platform needed to manage a vast and complex ecosystem of retailers, suppliers, and products, as well as diverse datasets—including supplier catalogs, retailer preferences, and datasets related to pricing and promotion.
• Performance bottlenecks: High page load times were negatively affecting user experience and engagement.
• Operational inefficiencies: Without a cloud-based solution, monitoring and scaling databases became cumbersome. This led to frequent downtime, including two major incidents of over one hour in FY23, and reduced development velocity as over 50% of developers’ time was spent on ‘business as usual’ tasks and incident support.

It became clear that we needed to move to a fully managed database model.

THE SOLUTION

Migrating to MongoDB Atlas to manage data complexity and boost operational efficiencies

New Aim migrated to MongoDB Atlas In August 2024. It took only four minutes to migrate over 40GB of data. The process was smooth, without any data losses or disruptions to New Aim’s operations.

Since December 2024, MongoDB Atlas has been powering many of Dropshipzone’s applications and capabilities. This includes underpinning the company’s product auditing and catalog of over 100,000 products, as well as promotions and pricing.

“MongoDB Atlas’s document database model is helping our team manage the very complex data architecture that we have built over the years,” said Lau. “Removing complexity is instrumental because it gives us the flexibility and agility needed to operate in retail’s highly dynamic market.”

The added automation capabilities brought by MongoDB Performance Advisor also helped recommend index optimisations. This improved performance dramatically: for example, page loading speed has improved by 85%. The index optimisation has also made the product search experience much easier for retailers as new products are continually added to New Aim’s catalog.

Previously, keyword searches were done by getting matched products to MongoDB, and choosing which products should be displayed. With the new product page built as part of the MongoDB Atlas migration, New Aim can rely on the joint product search (product IT and product contents) to return accurate searches to clients directly.

“We also optimised document searches, allowing us to shift new arrivals to MongoDB Queries. This makes searching results much easier as they come directly from the MongoDB platform,” said Lau.

OUTCOME

Set up for 1 million products, +85% performance, and improved NPS score

The scale provided by MongoDB Atlas has made it possible for Dropshipzone to keep expanding as more retailers, suppliers, and products are added to the platform. It has also given New Aim the confidence it needs to fulfill its plans to eventually bring one million products to its marketplace by 2030.

MongoDB Atlas serves as the interface for receiving uploaded orders from various client platforms such as APIs, user interface applications, Shopify and many more. MongoDB is also where all stock data and stock change information is stored.

Lau explained that MongoDB's efficient data storage and retrieval capabilities enable the data from these sources to seamlessly integrate with the live system. This results in a much smarter management of records while maintaining historical data for accurate tracking and analysis as well as enabling reliable tracking of stock updates.

All of this has removed issues like order duplication and stock inaccuracies while greatly improving the discoverability of products. This contributed to improving the overall user experience, and as a result New Aim’s net promoter score (NPS) score (which measures customer loyalty), has moved from 32 to 42 in 12 months.

MongoDB’s document model has helped remove a lot of data complexity. This means that New Aim’s data team has more time to work on projects that add value to the business, rather than spending their precious time managing the database.

“We were spending a lot of developer time fixing things but not building features,” said Lau. “Atlas helps us reduce a lot of maintenance time—the time spent managing the database and incidents has dropped by 50%—so we can focus on developing new things. and address customer needs.”

The next milestone for New Aim will be to enhance the search function. The team plans to use MongoDB Atlas Search and Atlas Vector Search to further improve discoverability and improve personalisation.

AI is also an important focus for New Aim. The team is looking at how MongoDB could power more gen AI capabilities, particularly to enable large language model use cases in light of the launch of their AI-driven analytics platform AirOxy early 2025.

To learn more about MongoDB Atlas visit Atlas Database.

To learn more about MongoDB’s search capabilities, visit MongoDB Atlas Search and MongoDB Atlas Vector Search.