Online Marketplace SHOPFLIX.gr Gains More Than 1 Million Customers in 18 Months Using AWS

Ecommerce platform group Wellcomm used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build SHOPFLIX.gr—a new online marketplace in Greece—in 9 months. The company used Amazon Aurora and Amazon CloudFront to create a high-performance, scalable marketplace that grew to over 1 million active monthly customers in just 18 months. AWS Partner Performance Technologies helped SHOPFLIX.gr cost-optimize its infrastructure on AWS and save 25 percent on infrastructure costs.

SHOPFLIX.gr is an online marketplace launched in March 2022 by ecommerce platform company Wellcomm. Based in Greece, SHOPFLIX.gr aims to provide ecommerce services with timely and guaranteed product delivery throughout the country. It connects buyers and sellers for a wide range of products, including consumer electronics, kitchen appliances, automotive, and B2B products. The platform has grown quickly—just 18 months after launch, it lists over 1,200 sellers, more than 5 million products, and has more than 1 million active users every month.

From the start, Wellcomm decided to build SHOPFLIX.gr in the cloud because it wanted a platform that could adapt and evolve with business and market needs. The main goal of SHOPFLIX.gr is to provide the best possible customer experience, from a friendly user journey to innovative product development and faster delivery.

Wellcomm evaluated both small and large cloud providers but chose to use AWS because of its diverse range of managed services, security credentials, and compliance with regulations such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Although the company had in-house technical expertise to build the infrastructure, Wellcomm worked with Greece-based AWS Partner Performance Technologies to help choose and then cost-optimize the most suitable AWS services and to control all aspects of the last-mile delivery.

Planning started in February 2021 and SHOPFLIX.gr was in beta testing by the end of the year. The service was launched in March 2022 with 60 sellers and 130,000 products and was expected to grow quickly. Its founders wanted SHOPFLIX.gr to be a dynamic marketplace where product listings would be continuously updated with new pricing, availability, special offers, and delivery options. This would require an infrastructure capable of scaling to handle vast amounts of data quickly.

Wellcomm chose Amazon Aurora, which offers unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale, with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility, as the main product database. “We needed a product database that is capable of handling extremely large volumes very quickly,” says Akis Hamamtzoglou, chief technology officer (CTO) at Wellcomm. “The database also has to scale and perform seamlessly as we continue to add more products and users, so we chose Amazon Aurora.” He explains that the SHOPFLIX.gr platform has to be always available, operate with minimal latency, and meet high security standards.

To improve performance, it uses Amazon ElastiCache, which unlocks microsecond latency and scale with in-memory caching, and Amazon CloudFront, which securely delivers content with low latency and high transfer speeds. The Shopflix website uses Amazon DocumentDB, a fully managed native JSON document database with MongoDB compatibility that makes it easy and cost effective to operate critical document workloads at virtually any scale. Each of the 5 million products listed on SHOPFLIX.gr are linked to several photographs. The images are uploaded by sellers and processed using a third-party app that is containerized using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes in the AWS. “We use Amazon EKS to host a variety of applications that we have developed, not just the app for processing photographs,” says Hamamtzoglou. “The middleware for our mobile app is also hosted using Amazon EKS.”

Credit: SHOPFLIX.gr 

Once the SHOPFLIX.gr platform was launched, Performance Technologies helped analyze traffic growth and consumption of resources. It worked alongside Hamamtzoglou to find ways to make more efficient use of the different AWS managed services. “Performance Technologies helped optimize our AWS infrastructure, which brought down our costs between 20 and 25 percent, depending on the service,” says Hamamtzoglou. “They provided us with a range of potential options and then we decided which services best suited our needs.”

SHOPFLIX.gr has experienced exponential growth since its launch and the company is keen to continue this trend. Focusing always on offering a compelling customer experience, SHOPFLIX.gr recently launched a new mobile app that is designed to make it easier to interact with the service. “AWS has made our life easier,” says Hamamtzoglou. “We can now focus on designing new services to improve our customers’ shopping experience.”

Security is a top priority for SHOPFLIX.gr. AWS helps it deliver a secure infrastructure with services like ID management, data protection, encryption, and SSL. In addition, the company uses Amazon CloudFront to monitor and secure its infrastructure from the outside world.

The SHOPFLIX.gr team is investigating how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) could be used to improve the listing of new products and product categories. “We are excited about the possibilities for how AI and ML might help automate the process of adding new products,” says Hamamtzoglou. “There’s a lot of potential.” The company has already started developing and training its models and believes that AI is a technology that can further optimize and increase the efficiency of its product cycle.

Hamamtzoglou is optimistic about the future for SHOPFLIX.gr and is very pleased with the company’s choice of technical partner. “More products and sellers will generate even higher volumes of data—fortunately we have built a scalable and stable infrastructure, so the sky’s the limit,” says Hamamtzoglou. “SHOPFLIX.gr is a living and breathing organization, we are always innovating and redesigning our services and it’s all made possible because we have the right partners to help us on our journey.”