Case Study: Zappos.com achieves scalable growth and exceptional customer service with MySQL

Zappos Uses MySQL to Power its Growth & Exceptional Customer Service

Zappos, founded in 1999 as a customer-service–first retailer, grew rapidly into a 1,000-employee e-commerce business carrying over 1,000 brands, 150,000 styles and nearly 3 million products. The company needed a database solution that could support fast growth and high availability without breaking the IT budget, so after evaluating open-source options it selected MySQL for its robustness and cost-effectiveness.

Zappos deployed a scale-out MySQL architecture—two master servers and five replicated, load‑balanced slaves—and subscribed to MySQL Enterprise for automated updates, monitoring, and 24x7 support. The setup powers their mission-critical site and internal systems with fast performance and high availability, gives development and production teams reliable vendor support, and helped Zappos earn #1 most-available Internet retailer recognition from Gomez Inc.

Zappos.com

Kris Ongbongan

Systems Manager