Amazon.com

About Amazon

Amazon is the biggest online retailer in the history of the Internet. Their headquarters are located in Seattle, WA.

Our Contribution

We've worked on various projects for Amazon and our biggest accomplishment was the complete rewrite of the ordering pages. This projet took 2 years and was motivated by a switch to a new technology that now powers the entire Amazon site. Our responsibilities included:

• Template Design
• Performance Tuning
• Business Logic Implementation
• Internationalization

Highlights

Migrating Business Critical Functions

In 2001, Amazon decided to part from its proprietary aging technology and replace it with PERL Inside, a technology based on PERL and C++ that would allow the website to grow as fast as the business.

In early 2001, the Target.com website (powered by Amazon at the time) was used to test-drive PERL Inside. This experiment led to the adoption of PERL Inside on all Amazon websites.

The Ordering Pipeline was the first part to migrate to PERL Inside and we took on the project.

Migrating a critical function like Ordering took a lot of planning and vision. The new software was rolled out gradually, handling eventually 100% of the traffic.

PERL Inside now powers the entire Amazon website.

Internationalization

Amazon operates several international websites: United States, France, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom and Japan.

All these websites had a different set of features and their own adoption schedule. They were each translated in a different language, and had country specific business logic and legal requirements.

In order to satisfy these requirements, Amazon developped a complete set of Internationalization techniques that allowed all these sites to be built on the same code. We helped develop and implement these techniques.

The same Ordering Pages now power all 5 Amazon sites.