Wouldn’t it be great if Black Friday, Cyber Monday and any other seasonal event would be met with zero slowdowns or downtime due to traffic peaks? Yet, most retailers face issues increasing website capacity during these critical times. The result: Annoyed customers and missed revenue.
With an increasing demand for elastic e-commerce capacity, it’s time for brands to switch to cloud-native e-commerce – and make downtime and crashes a thing of the past.
What causes website downtime?
For retailers, Black Friday is usually met with stress and weeks of preparation leading to the big event. Yet, webshops still crash and panic ensues. Why? Because traditional commerce platforms rely heavily on IT infrastructures that, at their core, scale poorly.
Brands deploying legacy commerce platforms guess their peaks and usually multiply that by five to size their production environments so IT teams can pre-provision infrastructure and software. Not only is this setup complex to manage, but it’s also incredibly expensive, wasteful – and can still fail.
The real cost of scalability issues
As website performance has a measurable impact on SEO and conversion rates, brands must move faster to provide fast, mobile-first and omnichannel experiences that are seamlessly integrated. Though the holiday season tends to surge in online shopping, high-volume digital purchases may happen year-round – not only on Black Friday. That said, brands should be able to meet unpredictable peaks at any time.
Companies with legacy platforms that rely on on-premise or hybrid infrastructures incur costs to manage every aspect of IT, like racking, stacking and powering servers. Increasing capacity requires planning months ahead and additional hosting fees to cover spikes. In a nutshell, the total cost of ownership (TCO) can hike exponentially, leading to a bloated IT budget.
Scale e-commerce with cloud-native solutions
It’s easy to overcome these challenges with cloud-native e-commerce solutions that support Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure. Not only do cloud-native infrastructures perform the heavy lifting of data centre operations, but they also enable brands to access far more computing resources than traditional hosted solutions. In short, the cloud matches the resources requested with the resources provisioned.
The cloud also helps brands reduce the TCO with metering (cloud computing is often called “utility computing”). Like electricity or water, brands pay only for what they use, shifting expenses from capital to operational expenditures while reducing IT spending.
These benefits mean companies are increasingly adopting cloud-native solutions, such as Qantas Loyalty in Australia. With Commercetools’ cloud-native solution, the airline has mastered two of its largest sales days ever in its loyalty store without constraints. With such positive results, Qantas Loyalty has expanded cloud-native commerce to the Qantas Wine Store.
True cloud-native e-commerce: Commercetools
Cloud-native e-commerce relies on the modern principles of MACH (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless) for optimal e-commerce performance. Powered by Commercetools, MACH-based architecture enables brands to unlock tremendous computing power, database and storage capabilities via an API endpoint.
In addition to being cloud-native, the microservices- and API-based solution means that when certain functions, for example: checkout or catalogue, experience a surge in browsing, there’s no effect on the website performance.
With such a modular, scalable and flexible commerce infrastructure, brands can finally do the unthinkable in the upcoming Black Friday and holiday season – relax!
Learn how you can adopt cloud-native e-commerce here.
