Wouldn’t it be great if Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other seasonal events could be met without slowdowns and downtime due to traffic peaks? We are facing the problem of increasing the capacity of our website from time to time. The result: annoyed customers and lost revenue.
With increasing demand for flexible ecommerce capacity, it’s time for brands to switch to cloud-native ecommerce and make downtime and crashes a thing of the past.
What Causes Website Downtime?
For retailers, Black Friday usually faces the stress and weeks of preparation that lead up to the big event. Yet the webshop still crashes and the panic continues. why? Traditional commerce platforms rely heavily on IT infrastructure and scale poorly at their core.
Brands deploying traditional commerce platforms guess the peak and typically multiply it by 5 to size the production environment and allow the IT team to pre-provision the infrastructure and software. Not only is this setup complex to manage, it is also very expensive, wasteful, and prone to failure.
Real cost of scalability issues
Website performance has a measurable impact on SEO and conversion rates, so brands need to move faster to deliver seamlessly integrated, fast, mobile-first omnichannel experiences. While online shopping tends to spike during the holiday season, large amounts of digital purchases can occur throughout the year, not just on Black Friday. That said, brands should be able to handle unpredictable peaks at any time.
Companies with legacy platforms that rely on on-premises or hybrid infrastructure incur costs to manage all aspects of IT, including racking, stacking and powering servers. Increasing capacity requires planning months in advance and additional hosting fees to accommodate the surge. In a nutshell, total cost of ownership (TCO) can rise exponentially and IT budgets can balloon.
Scale e-commerce with cloud-native solutions
Overcome these challenges easily with a cloud-native e-commerce solution that supports Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. Cloud-native infrastructure not only does the heavy lifting of data center operations, it also gives brands access to far more computing resources than traditional hosted solutions. That is, the cloud matches requested resources with provisioned resources.
The cloud also helps brands reduce their TCO through metering (cloud computing is often referred to as “utility computing”). Like electricity and water, brands pay only for what they use, reducing IT spending while shifting costs from CapEx to OpEx.
These benefits mean that businesses are increasingly adopting cloud-native solutions such as Australia’s Qantas Loyalty. Using Commercetools’ cloud-native solution, the airline achieved his two largest sales dates ever in loyalty stores without constraints. Such positive results have led Qantas Loyalty to extend cloud-native commerce to Qantas Wine Stores.
True Cloud-Native Ecommerce: Commercetools
Cloud-native e-commerce relies on modern principles of MACH (microservice-based, API-first, cloud-native, headless) for optimal e-commerce performance. Powered by Commercetools, our MACH-based architecture gives brands access to incredible compute power, database, and storage capabilities via API endpoints.
In addition to being cloud-native, the microservices and API-based solution means that website performance is not impacted by browsing spikes for certain features such as checkout and catalog.
With such a modular, scalable, and flexible commerce infrastructure, brands can finally do the unthinkable for Black Friday and the upcoming holiday season.
Learn how to embrace cloud-native ecommerce here.
