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Community Blog How to Ready Your Retail Business for Online Events

How to Ready Your Retail Business for Online Events

Find out how Alibaba Cloud is helping retailers setup, launch and succeed during online shopping events in this Retail and E-Commerce white paper.

Find out how real-life retailers are leveraging the cloud for success in the Global Industry Best practices on Alibaba Cloud for Retail and E-Commerce white paper.

Online shopping events are major opportunities for retailers. The Double 11 Global Shopping Festival, for example, is the biggest e-commerce event of the year, with more than 800 million participating customers and a total of US$74 billion GMV during the 2020 event.

But how can retailers stand out and succeed in today’s increasingly competitive online space? In this post, we reveal how retailers have worked with Alibaba Cloud to get event-ready.

Live Streaming Matters

Live streaming is now an established e-commerce tool, providing retailers with an interactive and engaging way to reach out to customers during an online event.

Recently, we worked with leading online shopping and selling platform Lazada, providing the company with the bandwidth and elasticity to support more than 1.3 billion visits in the two days of the 11.11 Shopping Festival.

To achieve this, Lazada leveraged our Content Distribution Network (CDN) and Apsara Live solutions to help Lazada create a quality live streaming service for shoppers and sellers.

Using our Omnichannel Data Mid-End solution, Lazada also linked its touchpoints to ensure every customer had a seamless and personalized experience when interacting with its brand – whether in the online or real world.

Innovate with Your Platform

Tokopedia is a leading e-commerce provider in Indonesia, which came to Alibaba Cloud to improve its approach to the country’s largest shopping festival, Ramadan Ekstra.

To achieve this, the company’s failing monolithic application architecture was replaced by a microservices-oriented one. This new architecture freed Tokopedia from many of its infrastructure hurdles, helping it to elastically scale and reduce response times.

Tokopedia also introduced image recognition and image-based searching, allowing customers to find items they see online and in high street stores.

The company is now leveraging our end-to-end big data solutions to get deeper customer insights using offline and incremental data sets.

Security Comes First

Online security is a major concern for many e-retailers, especially during a high-profile shopping event.

Apsara, Alibaba Cloud’s super computational engine, “ensured that networks and systems were scaled to process during Double 11, especially during the unpredictable traffic spikes, without incident,” Alibaba Senior Director Wu Zeming explained.

The Double 11 event is also protected by Alibaba Cloud’s comprehensive set of Security Solutions, which cover every aspect of application, data and network security.

Consider Machine Learning

The Alibaba Cloud Machine Learning Platform for AI provides end-to-end machine learning services, including data processing, feature engineering, model training, model prediction, and model evaluation.

This can provide retailers with data-driven insights to further optimize their business. Using this solution, it’s easy to implement a product recommendation service, for example, to personalize your product recommendations to individual customers.

5 Prepare for Spikes

During an event, e-retailers are likely to see a surge in demand for their online services and products. The elasticity of the cloud helps businesses manage these peaks without any performance issues.

Alipay, for example, recently used the ApsaraDB for OceanBase financial-grade database to provide the high stability, scalability and performance demanded by events like Double 11.

ApsaraDB for OceanBase supported Alipay’s transactions, payments and accounts, providing financial-grade consistency by using the Paxos protocol and data verification mechanisms.

To summarize, there are many cloud-based solutions available to help today’s retailers succeed during an online shopping event. Whether you want to provide a seamless user experience, delight consumers with new business models or simply make sure your architecture is secure and can cope with the resulting peaks in demand, Alibaba Cloud is here to help you, every step of the way.

Alibaba Cloud is a world-class cloud provider, helping retailers setup, launch and succeed during online shopping events. To find out more about our work and read more case studies, download the Global Industry Best practices on Alibaba Cloud for Retail and E-Commerce white paper today.

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