Cloud-powered online retailing

How Digital Goodie builds its customizable e-commerce platform using AWS while reducing IT costs by 20-30%

We’ve reduced our infrastructure costs by 20–30% using AWS because we no longer need a team of in-house database administrators.
Kalle Koutajoki Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

At a Glance

Using AWS, Digital Goodie helps retailers satisfy the growing demand for online grocery shopping, while reducing infrastructure costs by up to 30 percent. Its customizable e-commerce platform enables retailers to sell products online and operate services such as click-and-collect, home delivery, and drop shipping. Digital Goodie has created a scalable, reliable architecture using services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

  • About Digital Goodie

    Digital Goodie, operating in Europe and North America, provides retailers with a customizable, cloud-native platform for connected commerce that they can use to manage and scale their business online. Its customers vary from independent retailers such as Village Beach Market in Florida to chains such as S Group, one of the biggest retailers in the Nordics with more than 1,000 supermarkets and hypermarkets across Finland and the Baltic States.

  • AWS Services Used

  • Benefits of AWS

    • Reduces IT costs by 20–30%
    • Focuses resources on software development
    • Provides the IT flexibility to handle peaks in data traffic

The Challenge

Digital Goodie wanted to streamline infrastructure management and reduce capital expenditure. Kalle Koutajoki, co-founder and chief executive officer of Digital Goodie, says, “We didn’t want to spend extra time and money maintaining the components of our cloud infrastructure. Our goal has always been to focus on developing great software and provide exceptional user experiences for our retail customers.”

To cope with load spikes in online sales during public holidays and as a result of marketing campaigns, Digital Goodie sought cloud-based components that scale rapidly when needed. Secure connectivity between the Digital Goodie platform and its clients’ on-premises infrastructures was also vital.

The Solution

Digital Goodie’s cloud-native platform uses AWS, including Amazon EC2 to run the platform’s applications and Elastic Load Balancing to distribute traffic evenly across the Amazon EC2 instances. The company also uses Amazon S3 to retain website images and relies on Amazon RDS running PostgreSQL to hold customer and product data.

Digital Goodie takes advantage of Amazon ElastiCache to search specific data items. In addition, it uses a combination of Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, and Amazon API Gateway to help ensure highly secure connectivity for client apps, the platform, and customer integrations.

The Benefits

By moving to AWS, Digital Goodie cut its IT spend. "We’ve reduced our infrastructure costs by 20–30 percent using AWS because we no longer need a team of in-house database administrators," says Koutajoki.

Furthermore, the company’s software developers can now concentrate on developing the platform and new value-added services for customers. Koutajoki says, “We’re a software development company at heart, and the more time we spend on development, the better our services will be.”

Reliability has also improved. Because online stores are open 24/7, the engine behind the service can never sleep. By using AWS, Digital Goodie can rest assured that its customers’ services are running smoothly at all times. Plus, the company can easily scale the resources supporting its platform to meet periods of peak activity, which means that consumers always have the same high-quality shopping experience.

Finally, Digital Goodie now has a simpler, more secure way to integrate data from customers’ on-premises infrastructures with the cloud platform so they can deliver online retailing and services such as home deliveries.

Learn More

Learn more about e-commerce in the AWS Cloud.