Accelerates financial reconciliation by 50% with Cloud SQL
Achieves 99.9% uptime for reliable payouts with Compute Engine
Cuts incident resolution time by 60% with Cloud Logging
Scales to handle 4x shipment volume with Compute Engine
Sustains 3x merchant growth through auto-scaling with Compute Engine
Smartlane achieves 99.9% uptime and 50% faster settlements to unlock reliable, instant liquidity for Pakistani small merchants.
Smartlane achieves 99.9% uptime and 50% faster settlements to unlock reliable, instant liquidity for Pakistani small merchants.
Bridging the gap between delivery and liquidity
The 11.11 outage made one thing very clear: Our merchants were growing faster than our infrastructure.
Adam Ghaznavi
Chief Operating Officer, Smartlane
For Pakistan's small ecommerce businesses, growth relies on two fundamentals: getting products to customers and getting revenue back to the bank. Smartlane exists to solve one of the toughest challenges small and medium-sized ecommerce merchants face in Pakistan: fragmented logistics and delayed cash flow.
With nearly 90% of Pakistan's online orders fulfilled through Cash-on-Delivery (COD), payouts frequently take days, or even weeks, before reaching merchants. Each delayed delivery therefore, slows capital rotation, limiting restocking, marketing spend, and overall growth capacity.
Smartlane addresses this operational and liquidity bottleneck by unifying logistics and financial settlement into a single platform. The result is faster settlements, fewer operational delays, and quicker access to working capital, allowing merchants to scale without cash flow interruptions.
As Smartlane expanded from hundreds to thousands of active users, the link between logistics and liquidity was tested. During the high-volume "11.11" sales season, traffic surges overwhelmed the legacy infrastructure. Merchant dashboards froze, courier tracking lagged, and critical settlement reports had slower-than-usual generation time.
The technical instability prevented merchants operating on tight margins from verifying deliveries or initiating withdrawals during their busiest week of the year, causing immediate financial stress. The engineering team spent days "firefighting": manually provisioning servers and troubleshooting DNS propagation delays instead of building features.
Automating the flow of goods and cash
To solve its uptime, auto-scaling, and low-latency challenges, Smartlane migrated its entire logistics and fintech platform to Google Cloud. Today, the infrastructure adapts instantly to merchant demand.
This means that when a merchant receives a surge of orders during a flash sale, APIs hosted on Compute Engine automatically scale to handle the traffic without manual intervention. Memorystore for Redis caches frequently-accessed data to maintain sub-second response times, preventing the dashboard freezes of the past. Simultaneously, Cloud SQL manages the critical financial ledger, ensuring that every shipment record and payment reconciliation is accurate and consistent.
Behind the scenes, Cloud Storage securely houses invoices and proof-of-delivery files, while Cloud DNS manages isolated subdomains for every tenant, ensuring fast resolution speeds across the region.
With Google Cloud, we leverage managed services to meet uptime, security, and data residency expectations without heavy operational overhead. It frees our engineering team to focus on merchant experience and financial automation rather than maintaining infrastructure.
Syed Muhammad Tahseen
Chief Technology Officer, Smartlane
No longer consumed by manual upkeep, developers can now dedicate their time to building value for merchants. Meanwhile, Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring provide unified visibility into API health, allowing them to spot and resolve potential issues before they impact users. Additionally, the team uses VM Manager to enforce patch compliance, ensuring the platform remains secure and up-to-date automatically.
From 99.9% uptime to predictive AI
For our merchants, reliability isn't just a metric — it's peace of mind. When they know orders, tracking, and payouts will always work, they can focus on growing their business.
Fatin Gondal
Chief Executive Officer, Smartlane
With the new architecture, Smartlane now delivers 99.9% uptime, so merchants can dispatch parcels and withdraw funds instantly, even during flash sales. Reconciliation has become 50% faster, meaning merchants get paid sooner — a critical advantage in a cash-reliant market.
Operational efficiency has also surged, with unified observability cutting incident response times by 60%. This stability has enabled the platform to support a 3x increase in merchants and a 4x jump in shipment throughput without performance degradation.
Looking ahead, the team is actively exploring Vertex AI and BigQuery to forecast courier performance and cash-flow risks.
The goal is to analyze shipment behavior and delivery history to predict exactly when a merchant requires liquidity, allowing the platform to proactively offer pre-approved financing before a cash crunch occurs.
Ultimately, this intelligence supports Smartlane's vision to become Pakistan's unified logistics and fintech operating network, connecting the entire commerce ecosystem on a single infrastructure layer.
Smartlane is a Pakistan-based logistics and fintech aggregator. The company builds intelligent infrastructure connecting merchants, couriers, and financial institutions to simplify ecommerce fulfillment and finance.
Industry: Financial Services
Location: Pakistan
Products: Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, Memorystore, Cloud Storage, Cloud DNS, VM Manager
