Superdrug Boosts Fulfilment Capacity by 400% with a Cloud-Native Azure Platform
Superdrug, one of the UK’s leading health and beauty retailers, faced an urgent need to adapt when COVID-19 dramatically shifted consumer purchasing behaviour. With in-store footfall rapidly declining and online demand rising, the company needed a new way to maintain service levels while easing the operational strain on its central fulfilment systems.
To respond quickly, Superdrug repurposed selected stores as local fulfilment hubs, enabling customers to place online orders for home delivery or in-store collection. However, this new model exposed the limitations of their legacy on-premise .NET monolith, which lacked the scalability, performance and flexibility required to support distributed fulfilment at scale.
Recommended by a trusted industry partner, Superdrug engaged Ardanis to design and deliver a platform capable of powering a new Order & Deliver model — rapidly, reliably and ready to scale.
Superdrug needed a fast, resilient fulfilment platform that could support a sudden shift to online ordering while laying the foundation for a long-term, cloud-native architecture.
Key challenges included:
- Shift to Digital: Store traffic dropped significantly as customers moved online, putting pressure on existing systems.
- Legacy Monolith Limitations: The on-premise .NET system could only process around 56 transactions per minute and suffered frequent outages during peak demand.
- Operational Risk During Peaks: Events like Black Friday revealed severe performance bottlenecks, system timeouts and instability.
- No Scalability Path: The architecture lacked flexibility to support more stores or accommodate rising online demand.
To address these constraints, Superdrug required a platform redesign capable of enabling store-based fulfilment, increasing capacity dramatically and ensuring reliability across its national network.
How Superdrug Increased Its Fulfilment Capacity by 400%
Superdrug, one of the UK’s leading health and beauty retailers, faced a dramatic shift in consumer behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic. With in-store footfall rapidly decreasing and online demand surging, the company needed to rethink how it fulfilled customer orders. To maintain service levels and reduce pressure on central operations, Superdrug repurposed selected stores as local fulfilment hubs, enabling online orders with in-store collection.
However, their legacy on-premise .NET monolith was not designed to support this model at scale. It was limited to around 56 transactions per minute and required engineering teams to be on call during peak demand periods due to recurring outages. Superdrug partnered with Ardanis to design and deliver a new Order & Deliver platform capable of supporting a store-based fulfilment model with greater speed, reliability and scalability.
In the first phase, the new backend system was integrated with Superdrug’s existing website. Orders were automatically routed to the most appropriate store based on stock availability, allowing staff to pick and prepare items for local delivery or click-and-collect. The platform followed Superdrug’s established UI patterns, ensuring intuitive adoption by store employees.
The second phase focused on converting the solution into a fully cloud-native platform built for future growth. The monolith was decomposed into scalable microservices deployed on Azure Web Apps, with Azure SQL and Azure Storage forming the data foundation. Infrastructure was managed through Terraform, and automated testing and CI/CD pipelines were delivered using Azure DevOps. Secure, high-performance environments were ensured through Azure App Service Environments and Azure Key Vault.
Technologies Used
Technologies used: .NET, microservices architecture, Azure Web Apps, Azure SQL, Azure Storage, Terraform, Azure DevOps, Azure App Service Environments, Azure Key Vault, test automation and CI/CD pipelines.
Results
- Fulfilment capacity increased by more than 400%, with the platform now supporting up to 300 transactions per minute without outages.
- Cloud-native architecture eliminates performance bottlenecks and significantly reduces operational overhead.
- Smarter order routing enables fulfilment from multiple stores, improving delivery speed and customer flexibility.
- System reliability improved to the point where on-call support during peak trading periods is no longer required.
- A modern, scalable technology foundation ready to support future innovation and store network expansion.
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