MercadoLibre is the largest e-commerce ecosystem in Latin America, operating in 13 countries, including: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Serving a market of more than 550 million people, MercadoLibre provides buyers and sellers with a robust online trading environment that addresses distinctive cultural and geographic challenges. The company offers six integrated e-commerce services: MercadoLibre Marketplace, MercadoLibre Classifieds Service, MercadoPago payments solution, MercadoLibre Advertising program, MercadoShops online stores solution, and Mercado Envios shipping service. eBay is the largest common stock owner in MercadoLibre, with 18.40%.

Supporting continued growth with scalability, availability, and performance

More than one million users a month search for items, bid on them, purchase and pay for them using MercadoLibre’s proprietary software platform. While already the largest e-commerce company in Latin America, MercadoLibre is still growing rapidly—which presents a number of challenges for the teams responsible for the many applications that power the MercadoLibre business.

After originally creating a monolithic platform in its early days, MercadoLibre evolved to a decentralized approach for its applications and infrastructure. Business teams are responsible for their own applications, including the infrastructure, code, and IT staff. For instance, the MercadoPago unit has a team of 500 engineers writing and supporting the code for the company’s payment system. Decentralization helps MercadoLibre be more agile, with the MercadoPago unit alone deploying multiple times daily for a total of hundreds of deployments each week.

While a decentralized approach helps MercadoLibre accelerate its time-to-market, coping with rapid growth was still a challenge from an application performance perspective. “We were having more issues with scalability, performance, and downtime,” says Hernán Di Chello, product development director of the MercadoPago unit within MercadoLibre. “In payments, it’s critical for us to meet our service level agreements and deliver a great customer experience for all parties.” Di Chello decided that his team needed a tool to help it quickly identify and mitigate causes of performance problems.

For Matias Kusznir, technical leader of quality assurance for MercadoLibre, the lack of data about application performance was impacting his team’s work, too. “We needed better insight into error rates, application performance, and the experience our customers were having with our services,” says Kusznir.

“Software analytics help us understand many areas beyond just the technical aspects of our applications. New Relic lets us focus on improvements that impact conversion rates, save us money, and offer the best return on our development investment.”

Hernán Di Chello Product Development Director, MercadoLibre

Monitoring performance throughout the application lifecycle

The MercadoPago team was the first within the company to roll out the New Relic platform. According to Di Chello, the deployment was fast and painless and made MercadoLibre one of the first Latin American companies to use New Relic APM. Today, all the development teams within MercadoLibre use New Relic tools, including New Relic APM, New Relic Browser, and New Relic Insights.

“New Relic is an essential tool for not only our developers and engineers, but also our executives,” says Di Chello. “It gives everyone on the team a clear picture of how our applications and services are performing.” For the team within MercadoLibre who are responsible for API development, New Relic offered a dramatic improvement in how code is developed, tested, and deployed. “Before, we would deploy and didn’t realize that there were problems,” says Fernando Scasserra, senior product development manager at MercadoLibre. “With New Relic, the difference is like night and day, with New Relic pinpointing issues for us throughout the lifecycle, including design, deployment, testing, and production.”

Gabriela Segura, project leader for Mercado Envios, the company’s shipping service in Haití, credits New Relic with helping her team more quickly and successfully integrate third-party services. “New Relic helps us quickly resolve problems when we integrate new carriers,” says Segura. “For instance, we integrated a new service in Buenos Aires and New Relic identified several errors so we could quickly address them.” Previously working without detailed insight into why issues were occurring, the quality assurance team was surprised by the amount of errors identified by New Relic. “We found many JavaScript errors that we didn’t know existed,” says Kusznir. “Thanks to New Relic, we were able to fix many of those issues within a matter of minutes.” Kusznir’s team appreciates the ability to identify and track the variables that impact conversion rates from country to country. “New Relic Insights gives us the power to query across all of our applications and quickly understand which issues affect conversion rates so that we can focus on the most important areas for our business,” says Kusznir.

Improving performance to drive business success

With detailed performance data from New Relic, the business teams within MercadoLibre are improving application performance, availability, and scalability for a better customer experience. “Using New Relic, we reduced the error rate down to zero and improved the response time to less than 50 milliseconds per request,” says Scasserra. Gisela Saborido, senior developer with the checkout team for MercadoLibre, reports that New Relic helps her team respond more quickly to issues: “New Relic gives us the ability to detect problems immediately and fix them before they impact the customer experience.”

New Relic also helps MercadoLibre save money on its infrastructure even while scaling out for growth. “New Relic helped us reduce the number of virtual machines we use by 20%,” says Di Chello. “This cuts our costs, while also creating greater efficiencies in ways we would not have been able to do without New Relic.”

At MercadoLibre, everyone from developers to executives turns to New Relic to understand the impact of application performance on the business. “Software analytics helps us understand many areas beyond just the technical aspects of our applications,” says Di Chello. “New Relic lets us focus on improvements that impact conversion rates, save us money, and offer the best return on our development investment.” Kusznir agrees with the impact on the business of having better insight into performance. “With New Relic, we significantly increased conversion rates by improving the user experience in the browser,” says Kusznir.

“Using New Relic, we reduced the error rate down to zero and improved the response time to less than 50 milliseconds per request.”

Fernando Scasserra Senior Development Manager, MercadoLibre

“New Relic Insight gives us the power to query across all of our applications and quickly understand which issues affect conversion rates so that we can focus on the most important areas for our business.”

Matias Kusznir Technical Leader, Quality Assurance, MercadoLibre