Walmart Strives to be an Online Retail Leader with Node.js

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Walmart needed to improve its business. That’s not normally said about an international mega-corporation that made $482 billion in revenue last fiscal year, but Walmart has set its sights on becoming the world’s largest online retailer.

Walmart.com currently offers more than 23 million items for sale, and is rapidly expanding; earlier this year the company announced it’s inviting retail partners and smaller vendors to sell on the site.

The company already sees close to 20,000 hits per second on its website and mobile app during the holiday season, so it needs to build a fast, reliable, usable and bulletproof ecommerce system to reach its goals of becoming a leader in the online retail space.

That’s why it’s rebuilding Walmart.com with Node.js.

The core strengths that make Node.js a good fit for Walmart and other ecommerce sites include:

• Keep Content Consistently Fresh with Node.js: Walmart’s system takes advantage of the asynchronous I/O that Node.js famous for and makes use of its single-threaded event loop model to efficiently handle multiple concurrent request to update it site.
• Node.js Keeps Walmart Top of Mind: Node.js helps Walmart.com keep its content in front of Google and other search indexing robots with the help or React.js
• Using Available Talent as Full-Stack Developers: Node.js creates universal JavaScript, allowing Walmart to take full advantage of its talented JavaScript developers in all areas of its business.

If you are interested in more details around Walmart.com’s transition to Node.js, check out the full case study here.