The great advantages were already quite evident, but the test bench was the difficult pandemic parenthesis, when the closure of shops due to the 2020 lockdown forced the investments on e-commerce to the point that many were born in a short time, with the need to collaborate remotely with partners and employees.
In this context, the Cloud Computing for e-commerce has proven its true nature, enabling business continuity, creating a huge gap among performance-challenged companies and those able to stand up even in the most critical periods.
For the former there was no hope: the critical points of the e-commerce platforms, technical, graphic or content side, are paid for at the high price of loss of reputation, reliability and positioning.
The fastest site, the easiest to navigate and the one perceived as safest by potential customers wins. And it is no coincidence that one of the major digital trends for the near future is Cloud Computing.
This technology represents a fundamental lever of development and an advantage for online businesses with electronic commerce. And in this article we see why and how the Cloud Computing can support e-commerce.
E-commerce needs
Online stores have different functionality than other sites, this is evident. But often the way to get out of the quagmire and create a solid and prolific growing ground is not the same.
This is why the moment of goal planning is important, it’s the moment in which every company should put its road map on paper and only nthen provide the technology for the digital transformation.
which allows you to develop and grow.
An e-commerce site certainly needs to be able to count on greater flexibility in performing some main operations:
- to maintain databases where personal data is stored, protected and shared
- to make information easily accessible from different devices that rely on separate servers
- to process payments and track sales. Its existence, in fact, depends on the smooth functioning of these aspects.
Would you like to know more? Discover the digital transformation trends.
The advantages of Cloud Computing for e-commerce
After seeing in a nutshell what the needs of e-commerce are, let’s go into the details of advantages of Cloud Computing for sites that sell online.
Security – Data Protection
One of the biggest benefits of integrating the Cloud Computing in enterprise infrastructure is to secure internal and external data. Cloud technology offers secure data storage and as we know, security is one of the crucial aspects for e-commerce.
Online stores handle large volumes of private and sensitive information of visitors and customers who share personal data, such as address, telephone number, their card number, passwords. A breach of this data to the detriment of the customer can irreparably compromise the company’s reliability and reputation, as well as expose it to the risk of legal action.
Modern technologies and policies that characterize IT environments and cloud storage ensure confidentiality, integrity and protection from external attacks and DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial-of- Service), i.e. those with which hackers crash services by flooding servers with an excessive amount of traffic.
The consequences of this abnormal increase in traffic are the impossibility of making purchases on the site, as well as the compromise of trust in the company.
Scalability
Another important advantage of the Cloud Computing for e-commerce is its flexibility and ability to adapt to changes and company growth. In short, its scalability.
This means that if the number of visits to the site increases and/or if the number of products displayed in the shop window increases, thanks to cloud technology, e-commerce can easily adapt to this situation. Conversely, a local server should be upgraded.
It should also be considered that the services to be paid for also scale, i.e. any growth or decrease corresponds to the addition or removal of resources and the relative amount of bandwidth used. Bandwidth can be adapted to specific traffic needs.
This scalability means you no longer have to worry about storage space running out, or service charges becoming too high to pay, because you pay only for what you need and what you consume.
Speed
Investing in Cloud Computing is also an advantageous step in terms of speed of navigation between web pages. If a page takes a long time to load, people get discouraged and leave the site for another similar but faster site.
The page loading slowness can depend on errors of a technical nature that prevent the site from functioning properly (remember the famous Core Web Vitals from Google), but also by intense traffic spikes on occasion of promotions, offers with discounts or sales. When too many people try to access e-commerce, the site crashes.
This aspect is related to that of scalability, because increasing server capacity means avoiding these possible scenarios.
Costs
One of the benefits most appreciated by companies is the reduction of IT costs. The Cloud Computing also solves this cost issue related to some aspects:
- the need to acquire hardware and software equipment, without which one could not work, and which the cloud replaces very well with its technology. No need to purchase in-house equipment.
- the large consumption of electricity and space of large data centers that is cut down with the cloud. E-commerce stores can reduce electricity bills. Furthermore, with Cloud Computing it is possible to rapidly expand resources (according to the aforementioned advantage of scalability, paying only for what is consumed)
- the need to maintain a physical network and use resources. In this way, the IT staff freed from the tasks delegated to the cloud service provider can invest their energies in other activities.
Also, thanks to the Cloud Computing employees can benefit from cloud-based tools, from video conferencing services to accounting software, designed to securely organize and store data.
Site performance as an SEO bonus
Website speed plays a key role in the success of e-commerce projects. Several studies show that people leave a web page that takes over 3 seconds to load.
As stated, when we made the example of high traffic peaks, in correspondence with some moments linked to promotions, discounts, etc., in the case of a slowdown of the site pages, the most obvious consequence would be that of an increase bounce rate and a decrease in conversions.
Statistics also show that to increase the opportunities to achieve high conversion rates with e-commerce, it is necessary to guarantee a site speed ideally between 0 and 2 seconds . In reality, this time can last up to 4 seconds, but no more. A site that already takes 8 to 10 seconds to load is definitely an abandoned site.
Also in this case the cloud helps us, which reduces the latency of network performance, because cloud service providers store data and user archives.
High speed and performance have a positive impact on SEO. Search engines perceive the speed of loading web pages as a plus for the user who lives a much more fluid experience, thus favoring their positioning in the SERPs.
More effective, real-time data analysis from multiple unified sources
Online sales allow you to collect data on customer activities on the various channels used. From the website to social media, an enormous amount of information circulates (Big Data) which can easily disperse due to inability to collect and analyze.
With Cloud Analytics we can store and share “siloed” data across multiple channels, unlike on-premises data analytics. Migrating to the cloud offers the opportunity to combine all sources of business data to create a more unified and complete picture. All business sectors, from the marketing team to sales to customer service, can Quickly access this data in one place, regardless of where it comes from.
Cloud analysis also allows you to process large amounts of data by finding patterns and models, predicting future requests and extrapolating information in real time.
