INTRODUCTION
Woolworths Group is Australia’s largest retailer, with over 200,000 employees, over 1,500 stores, and revenues of more than $67 billion Australian dollars. The group manages a diverse portfolio of retail businesses that spans supermarkets, general merchandise, digital platforms, and B2B services.
Woolworths is also the market leader in Australia’s supermarket e-commerce sector. Between 2020 and 2025, the company’s online business grew from AU$2 billion to AU$8 billion. Woolworths also now runs Australia’s largest online retail delivery operation, with Woolworths Group's WooliesX segment having fulfilled 44.1 million e-commerce orders during the 2025 financial period.
Woolworths’s rapid growth has been primarily driven by its digital capabilities and services that enable the company to stand out in a competitive market. These capabilities come from Woolworths’s early strategic investments in its digital infrastructure, which were made to give the company the ability to quickly scale, adapt to change, and enable innovation at pace.
A foundational element of this investment was the adoption of MongoDB Atlas in 2019. A modern multi-cloud database platform, MongoDB Atlas now powers many critical e-commerce services across Woolworths’s business, including loyalty, fulfillment, supply chain, and digital payments. Due to the materiality of the MongoDB-Woolworths partnership, Woolworths elevated MongoDB to Technology Partner status in 2025.
Digital capabilities created using MongoDB have also enabled Woolworths to reduce out-of-stock instances, offer customers increased value through real-time promotional offers, and to improve the overall customer experience with faster and more reliable delivery services. As of 2025, over 55% of online customer orders are fulfilled on the same day, with 41% in less than two hours (a 6% increase compared to 2024).¹ Importantly, Woolworths's resiliency has also improved, with MongoDB providing four years continuous uptime.
THEIR CHALLENGE
Legacy databases stifling innovation and scale
To meet the growing demands of its digital business, Woolworths recognized the need to move away from its monolithic, legacy systems. It was imperative for the company to adopt a modern API and a microservices-based approach to continue innovating and delivering for customers.
Woolworths’s legacy architecture created challenges in a number of areas:
- Rigidity: Components were tightly coupled—a change in one application (e.g., order processing) could unintentionally impact another part of the business, such as inventory.
- Stale data: The reliance on batch processing often resulted in stale data and delayed updates, negatively impacting customer experience. This also compromised accurate inventory visibility and the ability to deliver highly personalised promotional offers.
- Scaling constraints: Woolworths could not efficiently scale its services during peak demand periods. Entire systems would need to be scaled, even if only one service needed more resources, creating significant cost overhead.
- Lack of agility: A small change or feature release required testing and redeploying across the entire application, often with downtime. This slowed development and deployment cycles. In addition, any changes to data structure (e.g., adding fields, changing data types, or altering relationships) required complex, risky, and time-consuming schema changes.
“We knew that with the kind of growth we were experiencing, we needed a modern and flexible data platform that was adaptable and would allow us to independently change, maintain, and scale different parts of our ecosystem,” said Rohan Berry, Technology Director, Fulfilment at Woolworths.
OUR SOLUTION
MongoDB Atlas unlocks scale, flexibility, and agility
Woolworths experimented with a number of database technologies for their requirements, ultimately selecting MongoDB Atlas's flexible document data model as the optimal approach.
“We selected MongoDB Atlas due to its high performance, predictability, and flexibility,” said Berry. “MongoDB was consistently able to adapt to our rapid pace of growth, allowing us to release features faster, without any downtime.”
Woolworths began using MongoDB Atlas to build modular, scalable, and decoupled API-centric services that could be scaled independently.
The results speak for themselves: MongoDB Atlas has been able to accommodate increased customer traffic during high-demand periods with its vertical and horizontal scaling capabilities.
Another vital area of the business that MongoDB Atlas helps power is Woolworths's fulfillment services, which are responsible for managing more than 100,000 online customer orders each day, including home delivery and pick-ups. To cope with the increasing scale and demands of its online business, Woolworths replatformed many of its last mile delivery services from relational to MongoDB.
"Creating the right environment for the team is incredibly important. We want to make their jobs enjoyable and to free them up to focus on higher value work," said Irfan Baig, Head of Technology, Capacity & Order Management at Woolworths. "We follow an object-oriented design which can sometimes be difficult and complex with relational databases. But with MongoDB's flexible document model it's completely natural and user-friendly, which has helped us unlock so much speed and agility."
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