Case Study: Paneco.com Singapore achieves rapid scalability and 400% performance gains with Heroku

Heroku’s Scalability Enables Paneco.com Singapore to Leapfrog the Competition

Paneco.com Singapore, founded in 2015 as part of the global Paneco brand, is the largest online liquor store in Singapore and set out to dominate the regional online alcohol market. With a small development team and no dedicated DevOps, the company needed to launch a differentiated, high‑performance e‑commerce experience quickly, handle seasonal spikes (like holiday Champagne demand), control costs, and support broader international expansion—despite founders’ prior preference for on‑premises infrastructure.

Paneco built a custom stack on Heroku—Spree Commerce front end, a Ruby/Active Admin inventory system, Heroku Postgres and Redis, plus add‑ons like SendGrid, Sentry, New Relic and Searchbox—leveraging Heroku’s CI/CD, review apps, and one‑click scaling. The result was rapid deployment cycles (features in hours, multiple deploys daily), dramatic performance gains (average response times fell from >4s to ~700ms and scaling up yielded ~400% improvements), and a scalable, repeatable platform that helped Paneco leapfrog competitors and serve as a model for global rollouts.

Paneco.com Singapore

Benjamin Sion

CTO