Case Study: Walmart achieves 20% higher conversions with Akka (Typesafe Reactive Platform)

Walmart Canada boosts conversions by 20% with Akka

Walmart Canada, one of the country’s largest retailers and online commerce providers, needed a faster, more responsive web and mobile experience while cutting backend costs and improving scalability. Its legacy Oracle ATG stack required specialist teams, expensive hardware, and couldn’t handle high concurrent loads or rapid iterative development, and any changes had to integrate with existing systems with minimal downtime.

Working with Nurun and Typesafe, Walmart rebuilt its web and mobile stack using Scala, Akka and Play, splitting backend workloads onto commodity virtual machines in its private cloud and integrating smoothly with Oracle ATG. The Reactive architecture reduced developer startup time ~7x and development time 2–3x, moved ~40% of compute off dedicated hardware (projected 20–50% infrastructure savings), and produced a 20% lift in web conversions, a 98% increase in mobile orders, 36% faster page loads, and capacity for ~400,000 peak page views per hour and millions of concurrent AJAX requests.

Walmart

Simon Rodrigue

Vice President of eCommerce