Introduction
SSG.COM, one of Korea's largest online shopping malls, was created in 2019 from a merger of two major online platforms. Its parent company Shinsegae, the largest and oldest retailer in Korea, has a strategy of developing online shopping as a major part of its business. Its automated logistics center promises same-day delivery for up to 80,000 clients of consumer products such as fashion, beauty, food, and furniture.
For over a decade, Shinsegae marketed its products via various online platforms acquired through mergers and acquisitions. SSG.COM was established to integrate and operate these platforms. Several database environments were in place to support these platforms, including Postgres, but Shinsegae needed one maximum availability architecture (MAA) for its new flagship mall and went to market for the database with best performance and security.
Business Challenges & Goals
- Consolidate heterogeneous eCommerce sites into one homepage to simplify day-to-day operations and reduce inventory costs.
- Ensure higher availability than the current solution and improve performance of Korea's largest online shopping platform to strengthen competitive advantage.
- Reduce high costs of database support while increasing service levels, which was impossible to achieve with the previous database vendors.
- Gain greater insight into buying patterns to retain and acquire new customers in the highly competitive eCommerce market.
- Protect online shopping from cyber threats and ensure first-rate customer experiences.
Business Results & Metrics
- Doubled the performance of Postgres in a proof of concept that demonstrated the superiority of MySQL Enterprise Edition to run the consolidated SSG.COM online shopping mall.
- Boosted brand image, reduced overhead and inventory, simplified database management, and streamlined online business operations after consolidating 14 online shopping sites into one homepage, powered by MySQL Enterprise Edition.
- Increased eCommerce platform performance by deploying MySQL Enterprise High Availability and speeding up failover time for critical systems.
- Maximized homepage performance by logging and fine tuning queries with MySQL Enterprise Monitor, leading to enhanced customer experience and higher sales.
- Reduced support costs and benefited from superior service levels by relying on 24/7 MySQL Premier Support for all production databases, ensuring business continuity in the always-on eCommerce world.
- Gained insight into customer purchase patterns, payment methods, and preferred shopping times by using MySQL Audit to log and analyze online shopping queries.
- Protected the eCommerce platform against cyber security threats by deploying MySQL Firewall for monitoring, alerting, and blocking unauthorized database activity.
- Achieved fast, incremental backup and real-time recovery with MySQL Enterprise Backup, ensuring data protection in case of downtime or outage and uninterrupted service to customers.
Why MySQL Enterprise Edition?
"We've chosen MySQL Enterprise Edition for its reliability, user-friendliness, easy administration, and high performance. Those factors, coupled with constant support from the MySQL Team, have equipped us with a world-class eCommerce platform with which to expand our reach and grow our business," said Heeyun Yun, Manager, SSG.COM Co., Ltd.
Implementation
Partner rockPLACE, a MySQL Specialized partner, migrated multiple Shinsegae eCommerce sites to MySQL Enterprise Edition, following a six-month proof of concept.
The launch of SSG.COM took place in June 2019. rockPLACE provided consulting, design, development, implementation, user testing, user training, as well as post-implementation and ongoing support.
Future MySQL Products
SSG.COM is currently conducting proof of concepts for use of MySQL in delivery system and payment system platforms.
About SSG.COM Co., Ltd.
SSG.COM is one of the biggest players in the South Korean eCommerce Market that has 5.9 million registered customers. In 2019, they sold US$410 million worth of goods and services.
In the same year, SSG.COM was awarded the Grand Prize at the Korea Data Quality Awards for data standardization management by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korean Data Agency.
To learn more about SSG.COM Limited, visit https://www.ssg.com