When it comes to digital commerce, it’s more important to keep up with your customers than it is to keep up with the competition. If your eCommerce site doesn’t run as quickly and as reliably as online buyers expect, the only things your business will experience are high bounce rates, lower conversions, and more abandoned shopping carts.
It’s critical that your website’s infrastructure – the framework of your eCommerce solution – is optimized for speed and performance. Without a strong infrastructure, you’re going to miss out on huge opportunities to gain new customers, build your brand, and expand your business into the future.
Thanks to cutting edge technology, organizations can strengthen their digital commerce infrastructure in order to bring more flexibility, reliability, speed, and security to their online business. If you want your eCommerce system to run at peak performance, it’s time to make these three moves:
- Choose a cloud environment
Many B2B organizations are moving away from traditional on-premise site infrastructures and opting for cloud solutions, which are typically faster, more affordable, and provide better safeguards to protect their data. Cloud computing service options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) also provide more flexibility so businesses can scale and adapt their online offerings with the marketplace.
One of the most widely used cloud systems is the Google Cloud Platform, which runs on the same infrastructure as Google’s Search and YouTube products. The Google Cloud offers state-of-the-art security measures and data redundancy to combat the growing threat of data breaches.
While you may find less expensive cloud systems to host your eCommerce site, the Google Cloud Platform is the better choice because it provides greater peace of mind with its multiple hosting zones. If one hosting zone goes down, Google’s redundancy feature ensures your site stays online, with no interruption in services to your customers – something that’s not always possible with lower-price alternatives.
- Leverage application containerization
Once you’ve moved to a cloud-hosted platform, the next step is to integrate container software to your infrastructure to accommodate the amount of traffic to your site. Containerization technology ensures a website is always available to visitors and operating at an optimal level. Containers, or standalone units of software, package up code and all their dependencies to allow an application to run efficiently and reliably from one computing environment to another. B2B companies can especially benefit from containerization when they execute product promotions and marketing campaigns that drive more visitors to their site. When there’s a surge in traffic, containerization allows applications to scale instantly, without rebooting the server or experiencing downtime.
- Utilize a container orchestration system to manage it all
To get the most out of container applications, employ a container orchestration system to manage all your containers. Kubernetes is an open-source system that does an excellent job of handling all the behind-the-scenes container activity, from grouping containers into logical units to updating applications quickly – all without sacrificing the user experience.
Infrastructure is crucial to eCommerce, because when a company’s website lacks speed and optimized performance, it loses the chance to attract new customers. Top-tier cloud environments like Google Cloud, and modern hosting and deployment technologies like Kubernetes container orchestration ensure that eCommerce sites are fast, secure, and most importantly, always available to buyers.
Unilog leverages these hosting and deployment tools to help power their enterprise software platform, CIMM2, putting them on the leading edge of eCommerce infrastructure. If you’re looking to strengthen your digital offerings and deliver a superior e-store experience, contact a Unilog representative today to schedule a demo of CIMM2.