Building global scale by bringing tech under one roof

Delivering flexible, regional websites for 1+ million monthly active mobile users

PUMA's web presence sprawls independent regions worldwide. Many regions use Salesforce to manage and display its web content. The technology team at PUMA asked us to help them transition from a per-region platform to a unified, global e-commerce platform without sacrificing each location's unique requirements.

Scaling across the globe

This platform needed to allow individual locations to manage their content, languages, payment processors, specialised campaigns, legacy systems, and other third-party vendors while enabling each site to scale, deploy, and change independently.

Graphic of three screens of Puma's websites across India, Japan, and United States showing how the global e-commerce platform can be adapted locally

Embracing MACH architecture

Our team's initiative is to build a scalable, unified e-commerce platform using best-in-class technologies. We're using a MACH (Micro-service, API, Cloud, Headless) architecture to build a platform that scales to millions of users worldwide while addressing each region's unique requirements.

Flexible API using GraphQL

The application pulls from a single GraphQL API which abstracts away each region's requirements. Using this approach, PUMA can decouple its UI from Salesforce and other third-party providers and only request the data it needs.

Server-rendered web app with caching

The web application itself is a server-rendered Next.js site. For an e-commerce website, server-rendering is crucial – allowing for rapid page loads, high cacheability, and consistent SEO performance. Next.js offers best-in-class developer experience and is supported worldwide by open-source developers. We use Fastly's CDN to cache server-rendered pages to improve performance and reduce load on origin data sources.

Serverless infrastructure using AWS Lambda

The API and the Next.js application are powered by AWS Lambda. Traditional web infrastructure is often expensive and inflexible to fluctuating traffic levels. Serverless offers just-in-time scalability to meet customer demand while ensuring PUMA doesn't pay for resources they are not using. Serverless has made hosting PUMA's platform easy to manage, rapid to deploy, and optimized for performance and cost.

Headless CMS using sanity

Sanity is used to allow content managers to update content without the involvement of engineers. By organising data into an easily queryable state, Sanity allows departments across PUMA to find and use data from a single source of truth and allows content to be shared across the web and mobile applications.

Mobile screen of Puma's website with arrows highlighting body copy, header and call to action on user interface

Multi-platform mobile app using react native

With a unifying GraphQL API layer, the mobile team used React Native to build a cross-platform mobile app with many of the same features as the web app, as well as additional features such as AR try-on, preferred sizes, custom marketing content, and more. Like the web app, the mobile app is built from a single codebase and served to app stores in different regions around the world.

Two mobile screen views of Puma's web frontend interface with pull-out ratings & review graphic showing 4.9 out of 5

Our impact

Connecting global teams

Among the many benefits of this new platform, the most significant improvement has been the consolidation of application code across all regions. A single bug fix is applied to everyone, everywhere, at once. Adding new regions takes little effort and benefits from the already-written code for other locations and providers. Allowing all of PUMA to move forward together faster.

Increased speed, flexibility and scale

Changes to content, configuration, and products are also significantly faster. What used to take PUMA almost 24 hours to deploy to production takes less than 5 minutes today. With the new metrics and monitoring, PUMA can spot regressions immediately and precisely identify issues before they reach the customer.

1 million +

active app users monthly around the world

5 minutes

time needed to deploy any application or API change, anywhere in the world

Our capabilities

DESIGN

Design systems

ENGINEERING

Product development

Cross-platform application development

Developer experience

System reliability

Scalable MACH architecture

Serverless infrastructure

Web development

Mobile development

STRATEGY

Time to market

SEO performance enhancement

Check out more of our work at Nearform_Commerce.