Case Study: Staples achieves real-time, low-latency inventory and delivery visibility with Couchbase

Delivering accurate product availability and order delivery information to customers with low latency and high throughput

Staples, a major office-supply retailer, needed to deliver consistent, accurate inventory availability and order delivery information across direct and indirect sales channels while keeping latency, SLA violations, and throughput within tight limits. The challenge was to build an enterprise-grade visibility service that would act as a single source of truth for product availability and delivery promises and provide a responsive omnichannel checkout experience.

Staples implemented a centralized inventory microservice using Couchbase Server’s memory-first architecture for catalog and inventory management, enabling real-time B2C inventory and fulfillment, fast product catalog/pricing lookups, and reliable shopping-cart behavior. The solution delivered low-latency, high-throughput access to up-to-date inventory and delivery estimates, improving customer retention, acquisition, and traffic and paving the way to extend the same experience across other business units.

Staples

Pavan Kumar

Manager, Software Engineering & Architecture