Case Study: Best Buy achieves rapid, low‑cost, scalable app development with Google Cloud Platform (Google App Engine)

Best Buy Slashes App Development Time and Resources with Google App Engine

Best Buy, a multinational consumer electronics retailer, faced major challenges with Giftag — a social wish-list app that originally took eight developers more than a year to build and was difficult to scale or update because of a maintenance-heavy platform. The slow, error-prone admin work and high development effort delayed feature rollout and threatened the app’s ability to handle heavy traffic.

Best Buy migrated Giftag to Google App Engine, rewrote the app, and relaunched it in 11 weeks with roughly half the original development resources (about 4.5 developers), enabling effortless scalability and eliminating system administration overhead. The move cut development time and cost dramatically, allowed Best Buy to launch more than ten additional apps on the platform, and transformed how the company builds scalable, low‑maintenance applications.

Best Buy

Gary Koelling

Director of Emerging Platforms