"Scaling was the bottleneck in our growth. But, thanks to Confluent, we’ve been able to re-architecture with ease and harness real-time data to create better, more seamless experiences for all."
Alok Sharma
Director of Engineering, Meesho
Meesho is India’s only true e-commerce marketplace, with over 140 million average active users that visit its platform annually.
After starting off as a B2B-focused reselling platform, Meesho has evolved to encompass a single ecosystem that connects millions of sellers, retailers, suppliers, and customers.
As part of its mission to democratize e-commerce, the company was experiencing substantial growth—owing in part to its transition to a B2C business model. But this immense growth was creating scaling problems, limiting bandwidth, and putting a strain on its Apache Kafka® deployment.
To cope with increased site traffic and demand, the platform needed a new systems architecture that was scalable, resilient, and agile. Meesho’s team wanted to ensure that its main focus remained on solving business and engineering problems, rather than managing its infrastructure and platform.
Today, Meesho uses Confluent Cloud to offload the burden of manually scaling systems and managing infrastructure overhead. As a result, the company can expedite time to market, minimize operational headaches, and push forward toward its mission of democratizing data.
“Scaling was the bottleneck in our growth. But, thanks to Confluent, we’ve been able to re-architecture with ease and harness real-time data to create better, more seamless experiences for all,” says Alok Sharma, director of engineering at Meesho.
A system that struggled to scale
After moving from a B2B business model to a B2C model, Meesho experienced extremely high growth and had to re-architect its backend systems to cope with an increased volume of data.
After certain events—like the festive sale period—Meesho would frequently see up to five times more traffic to its platform and app.
“The problem we started facing was more on the engineering side, as the amount of throughput we were handling on Kafka increased,” says Sharma. “There were limits in the bandwidth we could handle on the installation, and it meant we had to do system-level changes to ensure we could work around limitations.”
During these sales, Meesho’s systems would struggle to keep up with demand and this was causing downtime, which, in turn, was impacting the customer experience.
“We realized we needed to move to a platform that would allow our engineers to focus on driving business growth rather than operational issues,” says Sharma. “Confluent really appealed to us because it was a way to do exactly that, without limitations.”
An agile architecture for ease of scaling
Confluent Cloud took up position as the central ingestion layer, transforming the way data flowed through Meesho’s ecosystem. It allowed the company to efficiently handle massive throughput bursts during peak events, such as the Diwali sale, where it reached up to 1 million requests per second.
Now, thanks to Confluent’s elastic scaling capabilities, Meesho can automatically adapt to changing demands without the need for manual intervention.
As a result, Meesho’s engineering teams were liberated from the operational challenges of managing Kafka clusters and infrastructure. This newfound freedom allows them to focus on their core mission: driving business growth and delivering innovative customer use cases.
What’s more, the real-time data capabilities of Confluent opened the door to further possibilities.
The power of personalization
In retail, reaching customers at the right time with the right product is key for repeat business and higher sales. Before Confluent, personalization was challenging. Relevant offers, suggested products, and bespoke deals were difficult to generate, as historical customer and purchase data wasn’t available in real-time.
Now, with Confluent, Meesho has unfettered data access—which has helped the online platform create a real-time recommendation engine.
“Based on previous interactions, location, and past orders, the system can promote specific products and provide bespoke offers to customers,” explains Sharma.
“This personalization incentivizes repeat visits and gives buyers a gentle nudge toward products that align with their buying habits, so we can give customers a unique experience every time they visit,” he said.
Monetization maximized
Prior to adopting Confluent Cloud, Meesho struggled with managing open source Kafka clusters independently. This required substantial engineering resources and ongoing maintenance, as scaling clusters to handle increased workloads during peak periods involved careful planning and manual intervention—which often led to operational inefficiencies and downtime.
Confluent presented a compelling alternative: Meesho could pay for network bandwidth and actual usage, which eliminated the need for over-provisioning infrastructure to accommodate peak loads.
Reaping the rewards of a scalable data streaming platform
With a fully scalable data streaming platform, Meesho continues to realize some great results, including:
Accelerated time to market
With Confluent Cloud as the core of its data architecture, Meesho experienced a vast improvement in time to market. The team is able to expedite the deployment of new features and services, significantly reducing the time spent on infrastructure management.
Enhanced third-party supplier experience
Meesho successfully implemented appropriate detection models, reducing logistical costs and ultimately enhancing the experience for suppliers across its ecosystem.
Teams can handle 3x more load during sale days
Scalability challenges also became a thing of the past. Confluent Cloud’s elastic scaling capabilities provides seamless handling of surges in traffic—eliminating downtime and ensuring uninterrupted customer experiences.
Meesho can now effortlessly manage three times the load during regular sale days and capitalize on peak sales opportunities without hesitation.
Greater cost-efficiency
Confluent Cloud’s pay-as-you-go model provided Meesho with a clear financial advantage. Along with the ability to optimize operational expenses, the team could eliminate the complexities associated with manual scaling to redirect their engineering resources toward innovation and customer-centric initiatives.
Dramatic reduction in order returns
Real-time data access through Confluent empowered Meesho to create a sophisticated recommendation engine, enabling personalized customer experiences.
What’s next for Meesho?
Through its collaboration with Confluent, Meesho has successfully navigated the challenges of rapid growth, scalability, and real-time data management.
But the company’s journey doesn’t stop there—Meesho is set to enhance its data capabilities by building an abstraction layer, which will democratize data and empower every team member to access data effortlessly. With invaluable support from Confluent, the online platform aims to create a more user-friendly and datacentric environment.
Looking five years ahead, Meesho’s vision remains crystal clear: democratize internet commerce for everyone in India. Data is the lifeblood of success, and Confluent’s solutions play a pivotal role in managing data and delivering real-time insights to achieve this.
“Confluent and Meesho go hand in hand. It’s a partnership that makes all the difference to innovation, scalability, and ultimately, achieving the ambitious goal of making e-commerce accessible to all,” says Sharma.
“Together, we’re working toward a future where data-driven insights maximize growth potential and enable every Indian to participate in the digital economy,” he said.
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