T-Mobile

About T-Mobile

T-Mobile is one of the largest wireless carriers in the United States, serving over 130 million subscribers. Known for its bold, customer-first Un-carrier approach, T-Mobile relies on modern, resilient digital infrastructure to deliver seamless commerce experiences across all channels.

The Challenge

T-Mobile’s digital commerce environment had grown increasingly complex over time. The business was operating across eight disconnected commerce platforms, each supporting different channels, products, and experiences. This fragmentation made it difficult to deliver consistent customer journeys and created significant operational risk during high-traffic moments like major device launches. During events such as the annual iPhone release, traffic would spike dramatically in minutes, pushing systems to their limits and forcing teams into high-stress war-room scenarios. Despite T-Mobile’s scale and innovation culture, digital commerce accounted for just 0.4% of total transactions, highlighting the need for a more resilient, unified, and future-ready approach.

Why Elastic Path

T-Mobile needed a commerce platform that could match the scale, complexity, and speed of its business without locking the team into rigid architectures or forcing a full rip-and-replace. Elastic Path stood out for its composable, API-first approach, which allowed T-Mobile’s engineering teams to build a custom architecture aligned to their existing AWS ecosystem. The flexibility to decouple commerce services from the frontend, combined with the ability to scale independently and integrate cleanly with other systems, gave T-Mobile confidence that Elastic Path could support both current demands and long-term innovation.

The Solution

Using Elastic Path as the commerce engine, T-Mobile built a fully headless, cloud-native platform designed for extreme scale and reliability. Elastic Path APIs power core commerce capabilities including product catalogs, pricing, promotions, carts, and checkout across T-Mobile.com, the T-Life mobile app, and thousands of retail locations. The team implemented an active/active, multi-region architecture to ensure high availability and rapid failover, along with blue/green and canary deployments to enable zero-downtime releases. A global cart strategy ensures customer sessions persist seamlessly, even as traffic is rerouted between stacks, allowing T-Mobile to handle massive spikes without degrading the customer experience.