Database Design for Retail Inventory and Product Catalogs

Today’s leading retailers and e-commerce companies – Walmart, Tesco, eBay, Fanatics, StubHub, Staples, Cars.com, and hundreds more – are embracing NoSQL database technology to build and run modern web and mobile applications. Why? Because NoSQL is better than relational technology in meeting the performance, scalability, availability, agility, and affordability requirements of these applications.

Rising customer expectations and competitive pressures are driving the need for NoSQL. Companies face increasing demands to deliver great customer experiences – i.e., fast, personalized, context- and location-aware. At the same time, they have to manage growing volumes of users and data, while reducing costs and time to market. These pressures create a new set of requirements for the operational database.

The operational database must also be versatile to support many use cases in the space, including:
• Product and pricing catalog
• Shopping cart
• Customer profilemanagement
• Session store
• 360-degree customer view
• Loyalty program management

To meet the demands of today’s digital consumer, retailers are leveraging the Couchbase NoSQL database as they move away from monolithic solutions to microservices-based architectures. In this paper, we’ll explore how these companies are building the product and pricing catalog with Couchbase, including data modeling and querying.