Case Study: OTTO achieves real-time personalization and cuts catalog update time from 12 hours to 15 minutes with MongoDB

Otto Reinvents E-commerce Personalization for More than 2 Million Visitors Per Day

OTTO, Germany’s leading online retailer for fashion and lifestyle (over €2B annual turnover and more than 2 million visitors per day), faced a growing problem: as its catalog expanded, personalization systems slowed dramatically. Rebuilding indexes and loading updates for merchandising and personalized experiences could take 12 hours or more, causing latency, poor user experience and lost conversions.

By moving to a MongoDB-powered catalog that stores products, attributes and customer profiles in a flexible document model, OTTO now takes real-time updates and delivers consistently low-latency reads—cutting catalog update time from 12 hours to 15 minutes. The new architecture scales to about 800 page impressions per second, enables true real-time, omnichannel personalization, speeds development across teams, and has boosted engagement and revenue.

OTTO

Peter Wolter

Head of E- Commerce Solutions and Technology