Products & Platforms at Otto and Tchibo
Otto, Tchibo — Retail & E-Commerce
Scalable product data platforms and high-performance push notifications for retail.
Millions of push messages in real time, product data enriched automatically
Challenge
Otto runs one of Germany’s largest e-commerce marketplaces — with millions of customers and thousands of suppliers. Two major technical challenges shaped the project: consolidating product data arriving in dozens of formats, and delivering millions of push notifications within seconds.
Starting Point
Product data: Data from thousands of sources with no unified format. Manual data preparation was the bottleneck — every new supplier meant additional mapping work.
Push notifications: The legacy system had hit its scaling limit. Promotional push is a key revenue driver at Otto — millions of messages a week generate millions in revenue. Any outage or delay costs money directly.
Approach
A cross-functional team of one architect, four full-stack developers, and a product owner took full ownership — from concept through implementation to operations.
Push platform (10 months):
- Complete rebuild as a serverless architecture on AWS
- TypeScript Lambdas for business logic
- REST APIs and message-based interfaces (SNS/SQS) for marketing and BI systems
- An Angular web UI for campaign management and transactional templates
- Firebase integration for cross-platform push delivery (Android & iOS)
Product data platform (24 months):
- Built automated data pipelines
- Developed a product data agent for automatic enrichment and validation
- Migrated incrementally without disrupting live operations
- Integrated with existing e-commerce systems
Solution
The new push platform processes campaigns with millions of recipients faster and at greater scale. The performance gains enable minute-precise promotion of live events. Push token management automatically cleans up inactive devices — even app users who aren’t logged in become addressable.
The product data pipeline enriches attributes automatically, validates them against business rules, and normalizes supplier formats into the target format.
Value / Results
- Millions of push messages in real time, minute-precise campaigns
- Product data automatically enriched and validated
- Seamless integration into existing systems
- Scaling without loss of quality
- Push platform: from a legacy system at its limit to a serverless architecture with headroom to grow
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