Case Study: Mercari achieves rapid feature development and scalable marketplace operations with Google Cloud Platform

Mercari Running microservices and enabling smartphone payment with Google Cloud

Mercari, Japan’s largest peer-to-peer marketplace, needed a faster way to launch and scale new features for its U.S. app while reducing the burden of managing infrastructure. The company also faced database demands for its Merpay mobile payment service, requiring high availability, scalability, and secure transaction processing. Mercari used Google Cloud Platform, including Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud Spanner, to support these goals.

Google Cloud Platform helped Mercari move from a monolithic system to a microservices architecture on Google Kubernetes Engine, with an API gateway to roll out changes step by step. The result was quicker development, including a new search function built in less than one month instead of two, and reduced infrastructure overhead with no need for a full-time infrastructure engineer. For Merpay, Google Cloud Platform’s Cloud Spanner enabled processing of thousands of transactions per second with up to 99.999% availability, and the service scaled rapidly to 2 million users within months.

Mercari

Suguru Namura

Chief Technology Officer