Boxed: Reshaping the wholesale CPG experience for a growing customer base
About Boxed
Founded in 2013, Boxed is a digital provider of wholesale products ranging from groceries and household staples to health supplies. The technology-first company curates unique customer experiences within the burgeoning CPG market.
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About MongoDB
MongoDB, a Google Cloud partner, is the leading modern, general-purpose database platform. MongoDB Atlas is the global cloud database service for modern applications.
Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas help Boxed solve for rapid infrastructure and database scaling challenges in the fast-paced CPG market.
Google Cloud results
- Reduces compute expenses by 30 percent amid 2x growth in use
- Supports more than 50 unique applications for internal operations and customer experience
- Accelerates deployment pipeline times by 25 percent
- Allows developers to focus more on platform improvements rather than infrastructure management
Scales to handle sudden traffic increases of 30x without disruption
Consumers continuously seek out digital experiences that offer convenience, rapid delivery, and a wide range of products and buying options. Perhaps no industry sees this better than the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) market, as grocery shopping and other purchases now happen online more than ever.
Founded by a group of technologists in 2013, leading digital wholesaler Boxed, began with a simple concept—to make bulk shopping easy, convenient, fun, and more accessible for the typical consumer.
“We are different from a lot of competitors in our market because of the approach we take to curating our products,” says William Fong, co-founder and CTO at Boxed. “We power two-day or less delivery with our omnichannel ecommerce platform, have a nationwide fulfilment network, and provide last-mile delivery to certain regions. We focus on consistency in our supply chain operations, trust among consumers, and a more personalized buying experience.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the U.S., Boxed saw an enormous increase in traffic and demand on its platform. What had been a gradual shift toward online grocery shopping suddenly moved into high gear, and Boxed needed a way to scale up its infrastructure and data processing to keep up with the flood of orders that nearly doubled amid the pandemic.
With the large increase in concurrent users on the site, Boxed’s database ended up getting hit with thousands of read/write operations by the second, specifically for operations like creating new user accounts, adding/removing items to cart, and checking out. These actions require writes to its database, and Boxed had to scale up the resources available to its database to handle this increase in operations per second.
To accomplish this goal and best serve its customers, Boxed turned to Google Cloud and partner MongoDB.
“As we were researching options, we saw that Google Cloud best addressed our needs. We also just felt the technology was better over all, and that Google was always there to walk us through challenges when we needed support.”
—William Fong, co-founder and CTO, BoxedEnhancing scalability and elasticity across systems
Boxed was never a stranger to cloud computing, using solutions from several cloud providers since its launch. It has spent seven years developing its own in-house, proprietary omnichannel ecommerce stack that covered everything from the website, apps, and APIs used for shopping and customer engagement, to the advertising platform its sellers would need to sponsor products. The stack is also used to manage the business internally, such as warehouse management and robotics, ERP systems, procurement, a home-grown customer data platform, and more.
However, as its platform and customer base grew, it needed a more integrated, scalable set of cloud-computing technologies.
“We knew we were ready to migrate our infrastructure to a more integrated cloud environment,” says Will. “As we were researching options, we saw that Google Cloud best addressed our needs. We also felt the technology was better over all, and that Google was always there to walk us through challenges when we needed support.”
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) was the primary driver of the company’s decision to switch to Google Cloud. The company had been running its own clusters through another cloud provider, and this proved to be time consuming, expensive, and even distracting for engineers. Any time focused on cluster management meant less time devoted to improving upon Boxed’s platform. The team needed simpler, more automated maintenance and scalability that had an immediate impact.
“GKE is something we could manage a lot better in house, and we no longer have to worry about the Ops side of things,” says Brent Jaworski, Lead DevOps Engineer at Boxed. “We reduced our deployment pipelines from 45 minutes to 10 minutes, and we deploy new features on our platform daily.”
With its compute environment performing better, Boxed began to migrate its memorystore, SQL, containers, and more to Google Cloud. It now also runs its APIs, background jobs, internal tooling, and more than 50 applications on Google Cloud.
In spite of seeing Boxed’s traffic and associated compute usage double in the past two years, Google Cloud has helped the company to reduce its spending on the underlying infrastructure by 30 percent. Boxed has also lowered costs on Memorystore needs and other infrastructure solutions by 20 percent amid rapid growth, simply because its systems are more optimized on Google Cloud.
“With MongoDB Atlas, we can scale up our database by 4x within 10 minutes, and we have the added benefit of not having to run an inflated database 24/7, so there are clear cost savings.”
—Brent Jaworski, Lead DevOps Engineer, BoxedOptimizing cost, scale, and data management
Boxed needed a database platform that could handle the terabytes of data associated with all its apps and processes and could democratize insights for its staff. Boxed had used MongoDB since its inception and decided to switch to MongoDB Atlas—its global cloud database service.
“We couldn’t scale up our database as dynamically as our compute workloads, so that could make it difficult to handle traffic spikes,” says Brent. “With MongoDB Atlas, we can scale up our database by 4x within 10 minutes, and we have the added benefit of not having to run an inflated database 24/7, so there are clear cost savings.”
After being featured on CBS News, covering how customers were shopping during the pandemic, Boxed saw an immediate 30x increase in traffic. Without highly scalable database capabilities through MongoDB Atlas, Boxed would not have been able to serve new customers or get insights into the traffic that its team needed to manage inventory in real time.
“Our business is fully dependent on the amount and quality of data we have. Since we are not in a high-margin industry, we need to be well informed to best manage our operations,” says Will. “This was especially true after the live press event. We were able to work with MongoDB Charts to draw up the right dashboards and deliver the insights our team needed to succeed.”
Because so much of its tech-savvy team relies on data, Boxed takes advantage of the enhanced access management provided by MongoDB Atlas. Developers can now go into the database in a secure and seamless way without having to burden other teams with requests to provide new insights.
“Giving our developers access to index information and performance metrics improves their understanding of what they should be looking for as they’re developing code,” says Brent. “It’s been a great experience. The visibility we have now has had a positive impact on our developers every day.”
“We’re not only using Google Meet to connect with each other for business meetings, but also to keep more social engagement across our teams. Meet enables us to stay connected and work and socialize, which has proved vital to fostering a positive work environment during very challenging times.”
—William Fong, co-founder and CTO, BoxedRemote collaboration with ease
Boxed has always used Google Workspace for collaboration, as it has staff in locations across the U.S. Since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company has seen its number of Google Meet instances increase by 4x. On the day Boxed experienced the 30x increase in traffic, Will and Brent were on a continuous Meet session with several engineers for more than 12 hours.
Thanks to Meet, leadership was able to stay in step with engineers, developers, and others across the business, as Boxed used the video conferencing solution to establish a type of war room. This enabled the fast and coordinated triaging of issues as they arose.
“We’re not only using Google Meet to connect with each other for business meetings, but also to keep more social engagement across our teams,” says Will. “Google Meet enables us to stay connected and work and socialize, which has proved vital to fostering a positive work environment during very challenging times.
Stepping into the next era of CPG
Boxed has so far quickly pivoted its operations as it responds to the COVID-19 crisis, and its leadership believes that this event will have permanent impacts on the CPG industry. For example, the company quickly implemented social distancing practices in its warehouses and automated more processes to reduce the need to touch equipment and products, increasing safety for its workforce.
In addition, Boxed has seen just how much potential there is for growth across the U.S., as well as what it will need to do to support its growing customer base by improving its platform. Boxed has built a scalable omnichannel infrastructure designed for grocery and continues to explore partnership opportunities to bring more products to its customers conveniently and safely.
The company intends to maintain its highly agile platform to compete as more customers and competitors flood into the market.
“We’re seeing more demand and more general awareness, especially in parts of the U.S. that had not traditionally purchased wholesale goods digitally,” says Will. “That will continue to grow for years as more people see the benefit of online CPG shopping.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Boxed
Founded in 2013, Boxed is a digital provider of wholesale products ranging from groceries and household staples to health supplies. The technology-first company curates unique customer experiences within the burgeoning CPG market.
About MongoDB
MongoDB, a Google Cloud partner, is the leading modern, general-purpose database platform. MongoDB Atlas is the global cloud database service for modern applications.