Why Document Databases Are Popular Among High-Profile E-commerce Sites
by Pijus Maity Ecommerce Published on: 29 March 2025 Last Updated on: 03 July 2025
So, Why Document Databases important in E-commerce Sites? Want an answer? Then continue reading our blog!
The e-commerce industry has grown in recent years to become the dominant method of shopping globally.
With over 5 billion internet users worldwide, Statista puts the value of e-commerce sales in 2025 at exceeding $4.3 trillion.
E-commerce platforms, along with rising customer numbers, generate more data that requires collection and storage, and organization to improve customer service access.
In our publication ‘The Importance Of Data Analytics In Modern Business‘, we explained how the current information era demands major business strategies to be influenced by data analytics to a degree we cannot minimize.
Companies maintain competitive status through data processing of large amounts to discover meaningful trends that enable both efficient and precise business decision-making.
The effective utilization of data requires a suitable database selection by companies. High-profile e-commerce sites, in particular, need a database capable of handling:
- massive data volumes,
- scaling according to requirements, and
- organizing data to offer personalized services.
The document database is gaining increasing popularity among these high-profile e-commerce sites.
What is a Document Database?
Document database stands as a form of the NoSQL database architecture. These databases operate without using fixed row-column data storage systems like traditional relational databases do.
The document databases maintain flexible documents for storing different types of semi-structured and unstructured data.
Unstructured data lacks predefined structures or formats, which include text, images, audio, emails, and videos.
The popularity of document databases rises due to their ability to handle unstructured data because 80% of the collected data falls into this category.
Each entry in a document database contains field-value pairs where the values can represent strings, numbers, dates, arrays, and objects.
Document databases provide the important benefit that stored documents exist in programming norms such as JSON, BSON, and XML.
Why Document Databases important in E-commerce Sites: Explained!!!
In today’s competitive e-commerce landscape, it is crucial for businesses to efficiently manage vast amounts of data for success.
High-profile e-commerce sites are tasked with handling extensive product catalogs, customer data, and transactional records that require real-time processing.
Traditional relational databases often face challenges in keeping up with the dynamic and unstructured nature of modern e-commerce data. Document databases offer the flexibility, scalability, and efficiency needed to effectively handle these challenges.
This is why high-profile e-commerce sites are increasingly adopting document databases.
Product and Customer Management
Document databases can store a diverse array of data, as previously mentioned. For e-commerce establishments, this encompasses a wide range of information, including
- Product details,
- Prices,
- Availability,
- Customer names and addresses,
- Purchase history, as well as
- Images and
- Videos.
In the realm of e-commerce, each product, particularly those that are similar, possesses distinct attributes.
Major e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify handle a vast array of products.
Through document databases, all these products with their varying attributes can be efficiently organized within a single document, significantly enhancing retrieval. This further enables e-commerce businesses to utilize the data for personalized services as well.
Scalability and Large Volume Loads
The ability to scale horizontally sets a document database apart from a relational database. This means that the database can expand by adding more machines or nodes to the existing system rather than upgrading.
The document databases on MongoDB demonstrate how this data model can seamlessly expand to handle large volumes of data without a dip in performance compared to traditional relational databases.
This is because relational databases offer no way for developers to partition the database across multiple instances to scale as workloads grow.
High-profile e-commerce stores are always expanding in terms of products and customer numbers. Walmart, which has more than 20,000 stores in 28 countries, generates 2.5 petabytes (or 2,500,000 gigabytes) of data every hour.
The e-commerce giant uses NoSQL databases to handle the vast amount of data associated with sales transactions, inventory levels, and supply chain logistics.
Personalization
The way document databases sort and organize data allows high-profile e-commerce sites to offer personalized services that are tailored to their customers’ individual needs.
An article on Exploring Database Solutions in E-commerce notes how NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB, are suitable for this because the data for product review is unstructured and can change over time.
By collating the information in the documents, e-commerce sites use data analysis to detect patterns based on previous purchases and viewing history. This, in turn, allows for real-time personalization.
The most famous example is Amazon through its “Customers who viewed this also viewed” or “Frequently bought together” suggested products.
The site uses its document database called Amazon DynamoDB to provide these personalization services.
Behind every high-profile e-commerce site is a database that is capable of storing, scaling, and improving the site’s services. To cater to these requirements, high-profile sites are using document databases.
Real-Time Data Processing and High Availability
Live data processing stands as a major benefit of document databases when used in e-commerce operations.
Data processing occurs instantly when online shoppers use document databases for browsing products and making purchases, and seeking customer support.
Business activities can be directly updated through document databases to maintain inventory levels and set real-time prices, and launch flash sales simultaneously.
Document databases gain their reputation from being highly available data solutions. Distributed data storage is possible through many NoSQL databases.
This includes MongoDB and Amazon DynamoDB, which continue operating without downtime even when one server goes down.
Online retailers operating continuously need persistent uptime so the absence of downtime minimizes revenue loss, thus the system’s high availability remains essential.
Wrapping It Up!
Each major e-commerce website relies on a database structure to store data and enhance the operational quality of offered services. The needs of these systems require document databases as their solution.
Through their capabilities, these databases control large product listings and enable unlimited expansion while delivering customized shopping features to end users.
E-commerce growth demands flexible, high-performance databases similar to document databases to increase further in importance.
Businesses striving for market competition need to utilize document databases as their foundation for efficient management of rapidly growing data quantities.
So, Why Document Databases important in E-commerce Sites? Document databases serve as fundamental tools for achieving data-driven e-commerce decisions because the future of online shopping relies on them.
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