The situation
When a brand the size of Mayoral asks you to work on their e-commerce infrastructure, there's no room for bottlenecks. Their online store serves customers across Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. Every peak sales event — a seasonal launch, a promotional period — puts the catalog, checkout, and inventory system under simultaneous pressure from thousands of concurrent users. We engineered the backend around one principle: keep the database out of the hot path. A Redis-backed caching layer sits in front of the entire product catalog. Pricing, stock levels, and product data are served from cache on a TTL that matches their inventory sync cadence — meaning the database is consulted only when data is actually stale, not on every page load. Shipping integrations were abstracted behind a unified carrier interface, letting regional logistics providers be swapped without touching core order flow. Multi-currency pricing is resolved server-side with live FX rates cached on a 15-minute window — no client-side calculation, no currency inconsistency at checkout.
What had to change
The catalog browsing experience was degrading under traffic spikes. During peak sales windows, direct database queries for product listings, variant lookups, and inventory checks were creating latency across all regions simultaneously. The shipping layer was also tightly coupled to a single carrier — expanding to new markets meant significant engineering overhead each time.
What we changed
Redis caching layer on the entire catalog browse path, reducing direct DB queries by ~80% at peak. A modular shipping abstraction: each regional carrier is a discrete adapter behind a common interface — adding a new market is a weekend of integration work, not a refactor. Multi-currency handled server-side with 15-minute FX cache. All payment gateway callbacks processed via background jobs — checkout response times are independent of downstream payment processor speed.
What the client gained
- 01 Redis catalog caching — 80% fewer DB hits at peak
- 02 Modular shipping: new markets without refactoring
- 03 Multi-currency server-side with live FX rates
- 04 10K+ SKUs with zero query degradation
