Retail / E-Commerce

Retailers confront a daunting challenge in delivering advantageous e-commerce systems. Building a top-tier e-commerce system demands flexibility and speed. Success hinges on providing a personalized shopping experience with relevant content at consistent sub-second latency. Unsatisfied customers readily switch to other sites. Fast response and high availability are imperative. Research by Dynatrace reveals that a mere half-second change in page load times can impact online retailer sales by 10%. To achieve enhanced personalization, retailers have integrated third-party connections to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and chat functions, contributing to longer page load times. In the US, average homepage response times grew by half a second between 2016, from 3.4 to 3.9 seconds. Australian retail sites experienced average load time increases from 5.4 seconds in 2015 to 8.2 seconds in 2016. Globally, the average page load time escalated by 7% compared to 2016, reaching 4.5 seconds from 4.2 seconds. A major, North American fashion retailer saw online sales fall 11% when its website response time slowed by just half a second. When you have total annual sales in the region of $14B across 121 stores in the US and Canada, that’s tens of millions being lost.

Some of the complex business requirements driving today’s e-commerce systems include:

• Generating personalized shopping experiences in microseconds using multiple data streams
• Omni-channel systems that deliver a consistent shopping experience to the customer across mobile and web, and in-store
• Removal of data and system silos to present a single view of your data (warehousing, supply chain, social, customer)
• Flexible datastore that allows full-scale updates to an entire product catalog in minutes rather than hours
• The ability to meet peak demand workloads and then shrink systems at quieter periods to save compute costs
• Dynamic pricing, comparing against competitors’ catalogs, and then adjusting pricing in real-time

The business requirements listed above require systems and tools that are designed for today’s workloads, and for deployment in the cloud. Despite this, many businesses are attempting to deliver systems using technology that is decades old, resulting in a prohibitive total cost of ownership in terms of hardware, software, and time.

IT teams in retail/e-commerce face a wide variety of technical challenges that are driven by the high expectations around customer experience. Customers are easily able to buy goods from another store, and the risk of losing potential customers is especially high in retail. Challenges that retail/e-commerce businesses face today include:

• Building systems that add new business value while also remaining within tight budgets
• Cost-effectively running a 24/7 operation with zero downtime
• Deploying a system with fast and predictable responsiveness even if customer traffic spikes
• Keeping up with increasing demands for faster responsiveness
• Minimizing the risk of adding new capabilities via new technologies that could inadvertently hurt the customer experience
• Integrating disparate data silos that capture important inventory and logistics data that contribute to a positive customer experience
• Delivering on personalized, real-time offers that create upsell/cross-sell advantages that merchandising teams seek