Vietnam continues to experience an e-commerce boom, recording 51% year-on-year growth in 2020. The number of businesses using e-commerce is also growing rapidly, with more companies aspiring to introduce Vietnamese products to overseas markets.
About MERCHIZE
Founded in 2019, Merchize is an e-commerce platform in Vietnam that provides comprehensive solutions to help SMEs and retailers grow their revenue and introduce Vietnamese products to overseas markets. We provide manufacturing and fulfillment services, website development for e-commerce businesses and retailers.
Merchize has a large portion of its customers in Vietnam, but is growing rapidly in the West. Customers can choose the services based on their needs, such as setting up an e-commerce storefront, or opt for comprehensive support for fulfillment. Merchize manages thousands of e-commerce sites for its customers.
High quality printing products
Merchize offers the best prices and shortest lead times on high-quality print-on-demand products, including t-shirts, blankets, 3D printed hoodies, pillows, watches, phone cases, and more.
Estimated delivery time is guaranteed
Orders are processed within 1-2 days and delivered to buyers within 3-7 days.
A diverse lineup of high-quality products
Merchize’s products are thoroughly inspected at multiple stages to ensure the highest quality. Featured items include t-shirts, pocket t-shirts, blankets, phone cases, posters, wall art and more.
Who should use Merchize ?
- Businesses looking for a printing or manufacturing partner to complete their products
- Fashion and craft sellers on Amazon
- Artists and influencers who want to increase their income by selling products
function
- List Creation
- Order and inventory management
- Delivery Solutions
- E-commerce integration solutions
- Multi-Channel Fun
EKS on AWS Spot reduced compute costs by 70 %
With advice and support from VTI , Merchize decided to migrate its data to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and has seen many business benefits since then, which are published as success stories on the AWS site.
● Capable of handling 1 to 3 million website hits per month with a latency of 100 milliseconds
● Flexible pricing plans that contribute to cost optimization
● Highly available system that operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a
year ● Cloud infrastructure managed by a team of only three people
“As a result of migrating to AWS and leveraging Spot Instances, our overall infrastructure costs have decreased by 43%. This change has resulted in significant compute cost savings and we expect further cost optimization in the future, “ said Nguyen Duc Tung, CEO of Merchize.
Ongoing support for infrastructure optimization
In 2020, Merchize migrated from another cloud provider to Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Our industry partners introduced us to AWS, which offers better services and favorable pricing policies. AWS allows us to optimize our technical infrastructure costs, which not only optimizes our profits, but also reduces costs for our customers,” said Merchize CEO Nguyen Duc Tung. To maximize its reach to mail order sellers, Merchize strives to minimize usage fees by charging customers based on the services they use, starting at a base price of just $6.99.
After being introduced to AWS, we asked VTI Cloud, an AWS partner and IT company in Vietnam, to help us plan and execute our AWS migration. With VTI’s support, the migration to AWS was completed successfully as planned in six months.
The company also benefited from the strategic support of AWS: “We were very impressed with the support from AWS solution architects, experts, solution managers and the VTI Cloud team. They worked closely with us to ensure the migration went smoothly, helping us organize our architecture team efficiently from the very beginning,” said Nguyen Duc Tung.
After being introduced to AWS as a partner, Vietnamese IT company VTI assisted Merchize in planning and executing a successful migration to AWS within six months according to the project schedule.
The company also benefited from strategic support from AWS. “I was impressed with the support from AWS and the VTI Cloud team, including solution architects, experts, and solution managers. Working directly with us helped me to ensure a smooth transition and efficiently build my team of architects,” said Nguyen Duc Tung.
Phased approach ensures a smooth transition
Merchize implemented a phased migration, first testing 100 online stores and monitoring the stability and efficiency before rolling out to the next batch of stores. They use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the operation history, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store logs and 500-600 terabytes of customer and product data, and Amazon Athena to efficiently retrieve data from the database.
Before the migration, on the backend side, Merchize used Kubernetes to manage its containers. As part of the migration to AWS, the company began leveraging Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to automate orchestration and provisioning. This set up the Amazon EKS infrastructure to run the system on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances for cost optimization. The company now runs more than 80% of its total workloads on Amazon EC2, realizing monthly compute cost savings of 70% for the company’s Spot Instance needs.
Preventing service outages and interruptions on e-commerce sites
When Merchize designed its architecture using EKS on AWS Spot, 40 individual microservices were originally running on a single Spot instance node, but if a node outage or interruption occurred, it could have a serious impact on the availability of customers’ websites.
Merchize engineers, with the help of AWS’s highly skilled talent, are able to set up multiple pods on each node – a primary pod on Spot Instances and a secondary pod on On-Demand Instances as a backup. This allows for a fault-tolerant design: if a Spot Instance is interrupted, the node can fail over to an On-Demand Instance to keep the system running. They also configure Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to ensure high availability during peak customer shopping times on the website.
Multi-AZ architecture supports stability and scalability
AWS’s Multi-Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) architecture has provided high availability for Merchize and its customers. As part of its business expansion strategy into the United States, Merchize selected AWS US East (Ohio) as its primary AWS cloud region. “Multi-AZ allows us to achieve 99.99% uptime and consistent speed across our customers’ websites,” said Nguyen Duc Tung.
Main AWS services in use
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed container service that runs and scales Kubernetes applications in the cloud or on-premises.
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices.
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
Amazon Athena
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.
Effects of AWS Implementation and Future Developments
- High availability, fault-tolerant design ensures 99%
- Reduce your monthly computing costs by 70% with Spot Instances
- Overall infrastructure costs reduced by 43%
- Optimize costs with multi-tenant deployments
- Friendly support from technical experts
- Migrating thousands of online stores in 6 months
- Stores 500-600TB of customer and log data
summary
Merchize has completed its migration to AWS and is now working to take advantage of the AWS cloud infrastructure to improve efficiencies. The company engaged AWS and VTI Cloud to switch from a single-tenant environment to a multi-tenant environment and re-architect its platform.
After completing the optimization, the company plans to expand its data storage capacity and analysis services to AWS to provide better services to domestic and international customers. The company is growing at about 20 % annually and believes the system can be scaled to accommodate an ever-increasing number of customers.
