Scalability, reliability and cost-savings: cloud computing and e-commerce

For retailers, online shopping (e-commerce) is a 24/7 process. Shoppers shop every hour of the day, and whether you’re browsing online stores at 3am or you take a more 9-5 approach; retailers have to be online every day of every week. Just think “Christmas Day flash sale” and you’ll get the picture.

While ‘shopping cart abandonment’ and negative responses on review sites are symptomatic problems associated with an ineffective online store, the key issue concerns the flexibility of the service that retailers can offer in a cost-efficient environment.

Retailers should be looking at both their site’s infrastructure and functionality to ensure that they are getting a flexible and cost-effective service to provide customers with the most straightforward experience helping to guide them towards the final purchase.

Chris Bunch, Country Lead for the UK&I at Cloudreach, gives his three key points on creating the most effective online climate for retailers:
1. Scalability – Elasticity is critical for retailers when searching for the best cloud solution. Fluctuations in demand are a familiar occurrence for retailers, who need to be able to scale up and down depending on consumer interest - perhaps relating to seasonal trends, the fallout from advertising campaigns, or specific events such as Christmas or Valentine’s Day.
2. Reliability – The near infinite scalability that public cloud computing offers retailers, adds to the reliability of the service. For instance, with legacy infrastructure, you could have a consistently high-level of demand that puts pressure on applications, without the ability to scale up. This then leads to an unreliable or non-performant service. What can be achieved now, especially with providers such as AWS, is a series of multiple resilient data centres in widespread geographical regions - with more compute capacity than it’s possible to comprehend.
3. Cost – When thinking about cost, people often make the mistake of thinking purely about running costs. One must also consider opportunity cost, which can be greater in a competitive world. Legacy IT infrastructure restricts companies on the basis that it isn’t scalable and any updates that are needed are both costly and time-consuming. The ability to execute projects quickly with self-provisioned infrastructure is a critical facet for retailers and the weekly waiting times that had been an unfortunate aspect of the legacy era, have now been reduced to a matter of minutes.
Equally, utility pricing (paying for what you use) can be a huge cost benefit for retailers that need to scale up and down, sometimes at very short notice. Paying for what you use, means that retailers can increase service levels to complement a particular ad campaign or festive period, and then scale down afterwards - thereby paying for the peak only when needed.

Cloud is an enabler for retailers, not just because of the reliability and cost-saving benefits but because it enables them to swiftly and accurately control the service they have subscribed to. Retailers have to consider the cost of not adopting a cloud solution, as there will come a point where current infrastructure is simply inoperable - especially with the retail climate often being very dependent on seasonal or advert driven events, which can put a huge strain on retailers’ sites. For that reason retailers will soon find that it’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ they look to the cloud.