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How prepared are Drupal 8 + Commerce 2.0 to handle high volume e-commerces?

Hi there,

We are migrating our websites to Drupal 7 (we are waiting for Drupal 8.1) and so far the experience has been pretty good.

We host our websites on Acquia Enterprise.

Now we are considering starting a new e-commerce website which will handle large volumes of transactions. Considering that 30% of our physical stores sales go to the new e-commerce platform we will have figures and features as described below:

  1. Average: 200.000 orders per day (peak can be higher than 500.000 orders per day)
  2. Concurrent sessions (peak): > 100.000
  3. Catalog: 3.000 products (tens of categories)
  4. Stock/Inventory: We have a few Distribution Centers accross Latin America, so we have to have fine grained management of inventory. We have to check the stock for the closest Distribution Center when user checks out. Also if a particular product is out of stock in all of our Distribution centers, it shouldn't be visible to the user (or maybe marked as "out of stock") even in the home page. Ideally the user woulbe be able to buy online and pick up the items at the nearest store. Stock management would be quite complex. We will probably handle the inventory for Distribution Centers + Shops on SAP and expose that to the e-commerce platform through a REST API.
  5. ERP: SAP
  6. Great mobile user experience
  7. Product recommendation (we will probably use a 3rd party solution, but it's good to know if Drupal can do that too)
  8. Flexibility when creating promotions
  9. User personalization/segmentation - Similar to Acquia Lift, but for prices, catalog, promotions
  10. Multi-lingual
  11. Top notch performance (Mobile and Web) even on heavy load (black friday).

Considering Drupal for such a high profile e-commerce sounds crazy for most people (it does to me). But we don't want to give up on Drupal just yet. Mainly because our other websites are being migrated to Drupal and having Drupal handling also the "last mile" could be beneficial to our business through a more integrated UX.

We are already evaluating Oracle ATG (already used here for an old e-commerce we have), SAP Hybris and Magento Enterprise.

P.S.: All the spam in this forum make it look unprofessional :(

Thanks

jfbaro
Posted: Dec 2, 2015

Comments

bojanz Bojan Zivanovic on December 3, 2015

Sorry about the forums, they are supposed to be closed soon. This version of the site is counting its last days.

Right now Commerce 2.x is not functional yet. We are targeting an alpha1 for end of december and a production ready beta1 for end of february.
Commerce Guys has experience delivering high traffic solutions for Commerce 1.x / Drupal 7, though I'm unsure I'm allowed to share names and numbers publicly :)
Drupal 8 is unproven yet (unused for high traffic anything), but both we and the wider Drupal community are prepared to handle any bumps in the road.

The upside of going with Drupal 8 is that we finally have real multilingual capabilities.

Commerce Stock for Drupal 8 is planning to support multiple warehouses (https://www.drupal.org/node/2618906), and the author would welcome improvements.
From your description it sounds like your stock handling would most likely be custom, plugged into the Commerce availability APIs.

ERP integrations have been done on a per-client basis (community wide) so far, so you'd need to budget for custom SAP integration.
People do "related products" via taxonomy, but that's a far cry from real (machine learning based) product recommendations, which will always require an external recommendation engine.

Those are my initial thoughts, hope that helps. Happy to continue this discussion in other channels.