Ecommerce business operations rely on cloud architecture to function. As an extremely flexible and cost-effective option for data storage, cloud solutions are fundamental to the industry. To reach the full potential of your cloud architecture, however, you must optimize your internal workflows and processes.
Many retailers and ecommerce companies already have cloud architecture in place. However, implementing and integrating your ecommerce cloud architecture solution is only the beginning. There's always an opportunity to optimize your systems, find areas of cost containment, and ensure you're maximizing your existing platforms capabilities.
We assess the relationship between ecommerce operations and cloud architecture to get a good grasp of how to optimize individual use cases, all while presenting possible solutions you can use to start optimizing your cloud right now.
Customer relationships transcend the digital atmosphere. When a customer purchases a product online they expect to be able to return it in person if there is an issue and vice versa. Unfortunately, when an organization has disconnected channels, the seamless experience between online and in-store is lost. Connected channels improve the ability of organizations to accurately recommend products, present real-time inventory counts, and present customers with a seamless experience.
Ecommerce cloud architecture presents a solution to disconnected channels and other ecommerce challenges. By hosting through the cloud, retailers can deploy and manage real-time data across channels for an optimized system encouraging collaboration, communication, and an improved customer experience.
Benefit: Scalability
Significance: Scalability is important for an ecommerce store's growth. Without scalability, ecommerce organizations would not be able to provide accommodations to their growing customer base or provide the proper resources for future opportunities.
How Cloud Computing Helps: Cloud computing provides ecommerce organizations with on-demand access to resources that help scale up or down in real time as quickly as needed. This prevents bottlenecks and benefits maintenance services.
Benefit: Regulatory Compliance
Significance: Ecommerce operations collect customer PPI such as financial data and home addresses. Organizations need regulatory compliance to properly secure this data and prevent legal/ethical issues.
How Cloud Computing Helps: Cloud computing helps organizations augment compliance by securely orchestrating data pipelines with capabilities such as authentification, encryption, and behavior monitoring.
Benefit: Network Performance
Significance: Network performance can greatly impact the customer experience. If a customer encounters network latency and packet loss, the ease of use decreases and could potentially prevent the customer from purchasing there again.
How Cloud Computing Helps: By providing more flexibility with enabled microservices and cloud caching services, ecommerce cloud architecture can store and deliver data for quick access and deployment, preventing network latency and packet loss.
Benefit: Convenience
Significance: Ecommerce stores are built to provide convenience for customers. To achieve convenience for customers, internal operations must achieve it first. Convenience can lessen costs, increase flexibility, and reduce the use of excess resources.
How Cloud Computing Helps: Ecommerce cloud architecture achieves convenience for internal teams by providing on-demand and pay-as-you-go options. Cloud computing also allows ecommerce organizations to store, handle, and process data on off-site servers, minimizing the physical space needed for hardware.
Whether your existing system already integrates with the cloud or not, creating and following a cloud adoption strategy is crucial before integrating any additional cloud architecture. Without conducting proper research and assessments, incorporating ecommerce cloud architecture into an existing operational system can pose significant challenges.
For a cloud integration strategy to be successful, it must include procedures for cloud integration and management. Each of which will require a multitude of components that connect technology and internal workflow processes for an advantageous ecommerce operation.
To incorporate the best-fit cloud model and solution for your organization’s mode of operations, the first step is to identify the business’s needs and compare the benefits of each cloud service to those needs. While operation solutions can be supported with the use of cloud services, there is more to be done than simply purchasing and integrating a cloud model.
Cloud architecture management helps to create a seamless ecommerce customer experience. With real-time data storage, orders can be processed quicker and more accurately.
To successfully manage cloud architecture, team members will need to continuously monitor various elements of the cloud, including storage availability, organization structures, and security policies. While the various areas of management will likely be spread between departments and workers, each element requires a lot of work. Automation techniques, outlined procedures, and frequent training can help team members manage workloads without sacrificing the integrity of their management skills.
When optimizing ecommerce cloud architecture, it’s important to identify internal processes for preventative measures as well as growth opportunities. Cloud architecture is there to support your organization's workflow, not replace it.
Outlining procedures can save organizations from legal/ethical issues, data loss, and costly last-minute emergency maintenance. It can also help increase productivity by teaching team members how to fully utilize available resources provided by the service provider.
Auditing internal operations can help CIOs understand where cloud resources are being wasted, unused, or costing the organization. By identifying pitfalls and assessing ecommerce-related functions within the current cloud architecture, teams are able to examine possible solutions in the form of either technology or operation processes.
The customer and worker experiences are crucial to the success of ecommerce operations. It’s easy for customers to tell when the system is disjointed, disheveled, and unsophisticated. This makes it more difficult to build customer loyalty and promote business growth.
While there are different ways to optimize ecommerce cloud architecture based on individual business needs, the most effective way is to take advantage of those who have the expertise in unique cloud optimization and integration for ecommerce organizations. Specialty tech consultants and technical platforms/tools are able to provide frameworks for current business models as well as identify future growth patterns and accommodations that need to be implemented to help your organization thrive. The below tech solutions provide benefits in both flexibility and reliability.
Salesforce – Salesforce provides flexible tools and automation features to optimize ecommerce cloud architecture and operations. Salesforce also helps ecommerce retailers identify pitfalls for a scalable, flexible ecommerce platform.
AWS – Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services.
Tealium – Tealium offers customer data platforms to help clients build out a 360-degree view of their customers.
Concord USA is a consultancy that combines technology and industry depth with a get-it-done culture to enable resiliency, efficiency, and innovation. Whether you are trying to improve customer satisfaction, data strategies, security, or other technological issues, Concord can help.
Contact us today to learn more about how to build your ecommerce cloud architecture, our Technology Integration Services, and how we can help your business thrive.
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