Ecommerce is fast taking over the retail industry, but it’s not every ecommerce company that starts that has what it takes to succeed.
The ecommerce companies leading the industry are those who understand the landscape of the market and are prepared to use every weapon within their arsenal to get ahead of the competition. One of such weapons is cloud computing. Asides from cloud hosting, here are the other ways cloud computing is affecting the ecommerce industry.
- Scalability
With cloud computing, ecommerce businesses are better able to cope with an ever increasing and fluctuating demand. It makes it easy for a business owner to conveniently downscale or upscale the services it’s capable of rendering depending on the amount of traffic or demand going through an ecommerce website. This spikes in demand and traffic can be due to a successful marketing strategy of the business or simply seasonal spikes. With cloud computing scalability is available for an ecommerce website to easily access all the resources it needs to keep functioning at optimal performance.
- Redundancy in Cloud Services
Unlike dedicated hosting and other hosting options which can fall victim to uncontrollable forces such as force majeure, cloud-based architecture is more disaster tolerant. Cloud computing comes with built-in redundancies that can protect a business from either a temporary or absolute data loss. The infrastructure keeps data backed-up, secure, and conveniently accessible. The average e-commerce enterprise relies greatly on data provided by its customers and cloud services can help keep all that data safe in the event of a catastrophic occurrence that would normally lead to security threats or data losses. This makes it possible for a business to effectively overcome or avert a disaster and continue business with hardly a wrinkle.
- Speed
The value of speed to an e-commerce business cannot be overstated because it plays an important role in the business’s ability to deliver distinctive services. Studies have shown that the average customer summarily abandons a webpage if more than three seconds pass for said page to load. On typical hosting servers such as shared hosting, a spike in traffic can lead to reduced loading speeds and even an unresponsive website, but such problems are not visible with cloud computing due to its greater bandwidth, storage capacity, and computational power.
- Cost Reduction
Unlike other server options where you pay even when host provider’s services are not in use, cloud computing lets you pay for only resources which you have consumed and thus allows a business reduce and better control the cost of its operations. Also, as your business expands, there’s no need to purchase new hardware or software to increase cloud computing’s capability which thus removes the costs of maintaining or developing the business’ IT infrastructure.
These are just some of the big ways cloud computing has boosted performance within the ecommerce industry. With cloud computing, more online businesses are finding it easier and less costly to attain their goals, thus making it a real game changer for businesses all across the globe.