A Perfect Marriage: Ecommerce on AWS

This time a year ago, we knew that ecommerce would continue to grow… just plugging along with more and more people organically buying online. What we didn’t know this time a year ago was that a pandemic would soon grip the world, and like a wave, country by country, it would cripple retail stores and instantly drive online sales through the roof. For some retailers, this dramatic shift stressed systems beyond capacity, even more so than the swell of a single busy day, like Black Friday. The result of this sudden uptick in online shopping is that unprepared retailers missed opportunities for growth and many customers experienced less than ideal degraded interactions.

The Pandemic Effect for Online Retailers

Retailers that continued to run ecommerce platforms from data centers were suddenly relying on the available “just in case” headroom they had in place, while they negotiated for more compute power. Those retailers tied to commercial databases were suddenly buying more licenses and figuring out how to add storage. However, retailers using a public cloud infrastructure were in a much, much better position because their cloud-based systems could easily and instantly scale-up to meet surge demands—with no stress at all.

AWS for Online Retailers

AWS offers all the technologies online retailers need to manage growth—instantly. With technologies like automatic scaling compute resources, networking, storage, content distribution, and a PCI-compliant environment, retailers can always provide great customer experiences and capitalize on growth opportunities.

Rent-a-Center Grows Ecommerce on AWS

Rent-a-Center, the US-based rent-to-own company with 3,000 stores, runs SAP Hybris on AWS. This scenario provides a high availability, elastic solution that can scale up 1,000% without Rent-a-Center paying for idle servers. The company can use Amazon Aurora’s relational database engine for additional performance at a lower cost, and Amazon CloudFront handles its global content delivery. This end-to-end solution allowed Rent-a-Center to grow its ecommerce business.

Destination XL Group Manages Five-fold Volume Increase on AWS

Let’s look at Destination XL (DXL), a leader in men’s big and tall fashion with 225 locations that suffered from site outages and glitches with its hosted Oracle Commerce solution. The company operated at 60% server capacity, so it could handle traffic spikes. However, most of the time, the 40% capacity went unused—but DXL paid for all the compute capacity whether the company used it or not. Working with AWS Advanced Consulting Partner Pivotree, DXL rushed to migrate to AWS in 18 weeks so it would be ready for peak season. After migrating to AWS, the company saved 30% annually on hosting fees while handling 50,000 requests per minute—five times its normal volume.

Motorola Increased Conversion Rates 25% on AWS

Or perhaps you want an ecommerce platform built for the cloud like Motorola chose. With a goal of selling direct-to-consumer (DTC) around the world, Motorola worked with AWS Advanced Technology Partner VTEX to launch websites in 37 countries, all running on a modern microservices architecture on the AWS Cloud. On the new sites, Motorola can service both B2B and DTC channels, and it realized a combined 25% increase in conversion rates.

AWS Leads the Field

When considering cloud providers for ecommerce workloads, table-stakes are scalability, reliability, and security. The field separates, and AWS emerges as the leader with innovative services like voice commerce, livestreaming, and personalization—all at an affordable cost. With AWS, your ecommerce implementation will not be static because you can continuously upgrade your customer experience with compelling content and engaging features. Since AWS releases new services every year, there is always something innovative to enhance your site. We’ve got a strong ecosystem of knowledgeable resources ready to help your IT team improve customer experiences and take advantage of growth opportunities. Contact us today to get started.