Major Floral Retailer
High-Volume B2B Order Platform
Overview
A major floral retailer needed to modernize their B2B ordering system to handle peak volumes during holidays like Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. Their legacy system frequently crashed during high-volume periods, causing lost revenue and strained relationships with wholesale partners. The business needed a platform that could handle 10,000+ orders per hour while maintaining 99.99% uptime.
We designed and implemented a distributed, event-driven architecture with robust failover mechanisms and intelligent load distribution. The system handles order intake, inventory management, payment processing, and fulfillment coordination across multiple warehouses. Special attention was paid to data consistency and reliability during peak loads.
The platform has successfully processed millions of orders without a single outage during peak seasons, becoming a critical competitive advantage for the business.
Objectives
Handle 10,000+ orders per hour during peak seasons
Achieve 99.99% uptime including peak periods
Ensure zero data loss in order processing
Reduce order processing time by 60%
Integrate with existing ERP and warehouse systems
Challenges & Approach
Challenge
Maintaining data consistency under high concurrency
Solution
Implemented event sourcing with CQRS pattern, ensuring eventual consistency while maintaining strong guarantees for critical operations
Challenge
Preventing inventory overselling during traffic spikes
Solution
Built distributed locking system with Redis and optimistic concurrency control for inventory updates
Challenge
Ensuring payment processing reliability
Solution
Implemented idempotent payment operations with comprehensive retry logic and dead-letter queues for failed transactions
Challenge
Coordinating fulfillment across multiple warehouses
Solution
Developed intelligent routing algorithm with real-time inventory visibility and automated fallback strategies
Outcomes & Impact
Successfully processing 12,000+ orders/hour at peak
99.99% uptime maintained for 18 consecutive months
Zero data loss across millions of transactions
65% reduction in order processing time
$2M+ additional revenue from eliminated downtime
Key Learnings
Building high-availability systems requires obsessive attention to failure modes. We learned that every external dependency is a potential point of failure—comprehensive circuit breakers and fallback strategies are essential. Event sourcing provided excellent auditability and debugging capabilities, though it adds complexity that must be carefully managed.
Thorough load testing under realistic conditions uncovered issues that would have caused production incidents. We ran chaos engineering experiments to validate our failover mechanisms and found several edge cases in our initial design. The investment in comprehensive monitoring and alerting proved invaluable for maintaining reliability.
Technology Stack
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