Case Study: Gilt Groupe achieves cost-effective, scalable high performance and faster feature delivery with MongoDB

Gilt Groupe - Customer Case Study

Gilt Groupe is a leading flash-sale retailer that launches highly time-sensitive, high-traffic sales daily. As the business grew, its monolithic Postgres architecture made end-to-end changes expensive and slowed feature development across distinct business silos; Gilt needed a horizontally scalable, flexible data platform to support spiky loads, rapid innovation, and complex, evolving workflows like multi-step sale approvals and personalized email delivery.

Gilt moved to a service-oriented architecture and adopted MongoDB for schemaless user profiles, email systems, and a delta-based model for sale workflows. That shift let teams build and deploy isolated services quickly (e.g., two developers delivered a production email system in two months), achieve stable, high performance on commodity hardware, reduce DBA overhead, and lower infrastructure costs—while enabling faster time-to-market and ongoing plans to expand MongoDB usage for product data.

Gilt Groupe

Eric Bowman

VP of Architecture