Meesho: Scaling E-commerce in India with Redis – 10x Growth, 90% Cost Savings

The Challenge: Explosive Growth, Looming Instability

Meesho, one of India’s fastest-growing e-commerce platforms, connects millions of small businesses and individual entrepreneurs with customers across the country. With over 165 million app downloads, Meesho’s rapid success brought a critical challenge: how to handle massive, unpredictable traffic spikes, especially during major sales events, without compromising the user experience. For many of Meesho’s users, this is their first experience with e-commerce, making a smooth, reliable platform essential for building trust and loyalty.

During a crucial high-traffic sales event, Meesho’s existing ElastiCache infrastructure reached its limits, causing system instability and threatening the entire event. This was a turning point. Meesho needed a solution that could not only handle its current demands but also scale effortlessly for future growth.

The Solution: Redis to the Rescue with Immediate Stabilization and Long-Term Transformation

Meesho’s engineering team initially turned to Redis as an emergency solution. By migrating critical workloads to Redis, they were able to immediately stabilize the platform and keep the sales event running without disruption. This rapid success demonstrated Redis’s power and reliability, leading Meesho to fully embrace Redis for its long-term infrastructure needs.

Meesho integrated Redis into their Google Cloud environment through the Google Cloud Marketplace. Redis now powers Meesho’s entire layered architecture, providing the foundation for core services, the API gateway, observability, infrastructure, and utility layers.

The Impact: Unprecedented Scalability, Enhanced User Experience, and Dramatic Cost Savings

The migration to Redis delivered three key benefits for Meesho:

1. Unmatched Scalability and Performance
   • Handles Massive Traffic Spikes: Meesho experiences extreme traffic fluctuations, with up to a 20x load difference within a single day and a 10x increase during major sales events. Redis effortlessly manages these surges, providing sub-millisecond latency and ensuring a consistently responsive user experience for millions of simultaneous users.
   • Powers Real-Time Features: Redis enables innovative, real-time features that drive user engagement. Examples include:
     • “Spin the Wheel” Gamification: During a major annual sale, Meesho launched a “Spin the Wheel” game to incentivize purchases. Built in just two days, this feature leveraged Redis to process 100 million clicks simultaneously, delivering a smooth and engaging experience despite the massive load.
     • Live Commerce with Real-Time Messaging: Meesho built a custom live commerce solution using Redis as an adapter for socket.io. This enables real-time chat between suppliers and thousands of users, broadcasting messages instantly and reliably, even during peak traffic.
2. Enhanced User Experience
   • Redis’ sub-millisecond latency and real-time capabilities are key to maintaining a smooth and responsive user experience.
   • Real-time personalization keeps users engaged, even during events that are equal to Black Friday.
3. Dramatic Cost Reductions
   • 65% Server Cost Reduction: Over two years, Meesho reduced server costs by 65% thanks to Redis’s efficiency.
   • 90% Operational Cost Savings: Redis’s streamlined architecture and operational efficiency led to a 90% reduction in monthly operational expenses. The live commerce messaging solution, for example, reduced monthly costs from $5,000 to under $500.

The Bottom Line: Redis – A Cornerstone of Meesho’s Innovation Strategy

“Redis didn’t just come to our rescue in one bad moment,” says Kiran Katreddi, Meesho’s VP of Platform Engineering. “Instead, it became the key driver of our platform success, initiating the start of a trusted partnership.”

Redis has become essential to Meesho’s ability to innovate and scale. It provides the:

• Scalability to handle explosive growth and unpredictable traffic.
• Performance to deliver a seamless, engaging shopping experience.
• Efficiency to significantly reduce operational costs.
• Reliability to keep its e-commerce platform running smoothly.

“From managing massive fluctuations in traffic to delivering real-time personalization to our users, Redis has been a cornerstone of our innovation strategy,” concludes Katreddi.

Meesho’s story is a testament to how Redis can empower businesses to not only overcome infrastructure challenges but also unlock new levels of growth and innovation.