Case Study: Shopcade achieves 70M+ product scale and 90% faster imports with MongoDB

Shopcade - Customer Case Study

Shopcade, launched in December 2011, is a social e‑commerce app that lets users create and share personalized pages of favorite products. The company outgrew its MySQL prototype as it expanded from an initial UK launch to the U.S. and beyond—moving from a planned 2–3 million product catalog to millions more—only to find MySQL’s rigid relational model, slow imports and schema migration pain points were hindering scalability and agile development.

Shopcade migrated to MongoDB for its flexible document model, ease of development and sharding scalability. The move let developers change schemas in‑app, handle varied product attributes, and scale from ~5 million to 65–70 million products (with a target of 100M+), adding shards and ~30M products per market as needed. Imports that once took four days now run in about 12 hours (~90% faster), performance remains consistent as features grow, and the team can rapidly roll out social and gamification functionality—enabling faster innovation and strong user adoption.

Shopcade

Evan Adelman

Chief Technology Officer