Case Study: eBay achieves fast, scalable same-day delivery routing with Neo4j

eBay Now Tackles eCommerce Delivery Service Routing with Neo4j

eBay adopted London-based Shutl’s rapid same‑day delivery platform to power “eBay Now,” but exponential growth exposed limits in the MySQL-based architecture. Complex routing and courier-selection queries were slow and difficult to maintain, so the team needed a solution that could support routing queries at scale with fast, consistent performance.

They integrated Neo4j into the existing SOA (jRuby, Sinatra, MongoDB) and modeled deliveries as a schema‑less property graph, using Cypher for compact queries. The result was dramatic: queries became thousands of times faster with 10–100× less code, constant query performance, faster development, and a scalable platform that enabled expansion of eBay Now’s same‑day delivery service.

eBay

Volker Pacher

Senior Developer