eBay Korea Modernizes Core E-Commerce Platforms with Confluent

As one of the largest e-commerce companies in Korea, eBay Korea operates three online retail platforms: Gmarket, Auction, and G9. With Korea’s e-commerce market more than doubling over the past five years and the uptick in online shopping due to the pandemic, eBay Korea has seen a significant recent surge in growth.

While the increase in sales and revenues was welcome, the growth highlighted issues with the company’s legacy e-commerce platform, which had been in place for more than 15 years. Based on a monolithic architecture with a single large application and single database, the platform was becoming increasingly difficult to develop and maintain. “When business requirements are complex, the code needed to implement them also becomes complex,” says Hudson Lee, Leader of Platform Engineering at eBay Korea. “With our legacy platform, everything was interdependent, so updating the code in one area often led to unexpected problems in another.”