Boxed: Leveraging IoT to Enhance Wholesale CPG Experience Amid Rapid Growth

Boxed is a technology-first company that was founded in 2013. It is a digital provider of wholesale products ranging from groceries and household staples to health supplies. The company curates unique customer experiences within the burgeoning consumer-packaged goods (CPG) market. Boxed was founded by a group of technologists with a simple concept—to make bulk shopping easy, convenient, fun, and more accessible for the typical consumer. The company has spent seven years developing its own in-house, proprietary omnichannel ecommerce stack that covers 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.

Boxed, a leading digital wholesaler, was founded in 2013 with the aim of making bulk shopping easy, convenient, and accessible for consumers. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S., Boxed experienced a significant increase in traffic and demand on its platform. The shift towards online grocery shopping, which had been gradual, suddenly accelerated, and Boxed needed to scale up its infrastructure and data processing to keep up with the flood of orders that nearly doubled during the pandemic. With the large increase in concurrent users on the site, Boxed’s database was hit with thousands of read/write operations per second, specifically for operations like creating new user accounts, adding/removing items to cart, and checking out. These actions required 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 address this challenge and better serve its customers, Boxed turned to Google Cloud and partner MongoDB. Boxed had been using cloud computing solutions from several providers since its launch, but as its platform and customer base grew, it needed a more integrated, scalable set of cloud-computing technologies. 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, which proved to be time-consuming, expensive, and distracting for engineers. With GKE, the team could focus more on improving Boxed’s platform rather than managing clusters. Boxed also migrated its memorystore, SQL, containers, and more to Google Cloud. It now runs its APIs, background jobs, internal tooling, and more than 50 applications on Google Cloud. Boxed also switched to MongoDB Atlas, MongoDB's global cloud database service, to handle the terabytes of data associated with all its apps and processes.

• The adoption of Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas has brought significant operational benefits to Boxed. The company has been able to scale to handle sudden traffic increases of 30x without disruption. This has allowed Boxed to serve new customers and gain insights into the traffic that its team needed to manage inventory in real time. The enhanced access management provided by MongoDB Atlas has enabled developers to access the database in a secure and seamless way without having to burden other teams with requests to provide new insights. Furthermore, the use of Google Meet has facilitated remote collaboration, enabling the leadership to stay in step with engineers, developers, and others across the business. This has been particularly beneficial during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the company saw its number of Google Meet instances increase by 4x.

• Reduced compute expenses by 30 percent amid 2x growth in use

• Accelerated deployment pipeline times by 25 percent

• Handled sudden traffic increases of 30x without disruption