Case Study: eBay achieves high‑speed, scalable same‑day delivery routing with Neo Technology (Neo4j)

eBay Now Tackles eCommerce Delivery Service Routing with Neo4j

Shutl, a London-based same-day delivery startup later integrated into eBay to power the eBay Now service, faced rapid growth that made its routing and courier-selection queries unacceptably slow. The original MySQL-based architecture with complex joins could not sustain the scale or the fast, consistent API response times needed for two-hour and one-hour delivery windows.

The team rebuilt the platform as a service-oriented architecture using jRuby, Sinatra, MongoDB and Neo4j, modeling routing as a property graph and expressing logic in Cypher. This localized, schema-flexible graph approach dramatically improved performance—queries became thousands of times faster with 10–100× less code—delivering constant, scalable routing performance and enabling the expanded eBay Now service.

eBay