Case Study: CafePress achieves deep application visibility and faster cloud migration with New Relic

CafePress Modernizes E-Commerce Platform With New Relic Monitoring

CafePress, founded in 1999, is a large e-commerce marketplace for custom-printed merchandise—hosting more than two million designers and offering over a billion items. The company struggled with limited application visibility: performance problems were slow to detect and diagnose, causing prolonged outages that impacted both the website and manufacturing operations, and the team lacked reliable metrics to validate root causes or user experience at scale.

To solve this, CafePress deployed New Relic APM and Insights across its hybrid AWS/cloud environment, giving engineers deep traces, service maps, and custom dashboards for real-time and historical visibility. That monitoring enabled faster troubleshooting (including distinguishing AWS vs. code issues), supported canary deployments and nearly 200 monthly releases, accelerated migration to the cloud (projected 50% infrastructure cost savings), and materially reduced downtime and related revenue losses while extending visibility beyond IT.

CafePress

Bryan Downs

Vice President of Engineering