Case Study: Fortune 50 Retailing Company achieves sub-4ms checkout performance and record digital sales with Neo4j

Neo4j Transforms Performance of Global Retailer’s Website after Cyber Monday Failings

A Top 10 U.S. retail company (a Fortune Top 50 organization) faced a major performance failure on Cyber Monday 2015 when its IBM WebSphere/DB2 stack could not keep up with real-time promotions and recommendation calculations. Although checkout stayed online, 90% of customer traffic was delayed because the relational database couldn’t traverse the 15–30 layers of connected product and promotion data fast enough, harming the shopper experience.

The retailer deployed Neo4j as both a front-end and back-end solution to power pricing, promotions, recommendations and analytics, enabling real-time traversal of connected data. As a result Neo4j now handles 90% of the company’s 35M+ daily transactions in 4 ms or less (well under the 20 ms target), supported a 34% rise in Q4 2016 digital sales to a record high, and allowed consistent promotions across online and physical channels.