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How DevOps Can Transform Your Ecommerce Business?

2020-05-20by Varun Bhagat

devops in ecommerce
In the world of eCommerce, you might have heard about success stories of Alibaba, Amazon, etc. These people wanted to do something out of the box and they did it.

But now the eCommerce Industry seems to be saturated in terms of growth. Hence, there is a deep requirement of software/procedures that can enhance the optimization of the already existing procedures.

And here comes the role of the latest trending DevOps method. Let’s first discuss what DevOps is?

Introduction to DevOps

DevOps is known as the process of optimizing the software development process with the help of modern automation tools and fresh methods. This results in enhancing the tried and tested formula just by ensuring business to become faster than their competitors with the help of a quick iteration process while keeping into consideration exceptional flexibility.

Challenges that eCommerce Industries face to meet the customer’s requirement

Customers usually prefer shopping online. They use their laptops, mobile phones, and tablets to book orders. But in all of these devices, customers want the best shopping experience. The same customer can either using a tablet, either a mobile phone or a laptop.

All such devices have different sizes, pixel resolutions, etc.

Moreover, customers wish to be able to check the items left in the stock and to compare different prices and want to read reviews of other customers. Hence, this backend process is quite tricky to handle because of the high volume of the data.

Also, customers want to try clothes using augmented technology. This technology can easily give a preview of how clothes will look on the customer’s body. With the help of this technology, they can have features like mixing and matching, preview placement of furniture or other items, etc.

And here challenges for developers start coming into existence! As they have to create software with the least number of bugs. The expectation of customers cannot slow down. Hence, all the eCommerce businesses have only one option and that is to keep and keep adding new features to their online business.

Embracing DevOps culture has resulted in the revenue increment for big eCommerce giants like Alibaba, Amazon, etc. Hence, a DevOps services company can transform small eCommerce businesses also.

DevOps can optimize eCommerce business through:

  • Continuous Innovation

Progressive eCommerce entities survive on delivering new features to the market quicker than their competitors. This ability has been instrumental in bringing success and competitive edge to eCommerce giants like Amazon and Alibaba.

Entities that follow prolonged development cycles often realize that one big perfect software release threatens their capability to innovate on a continuous basis. Transformation changes are often built upon iterative and continuous enhancements.

When new features and functionality are not introduced to customers fast enough, organizations fail to receive real-world feedback that supports innovation and addresses new market challenges on a continuous basis. Consequently, the eCommerce platform remains inconsistent with the fast-evolving customer requirements and fails to set up a robust presence in the online world.

Consider the conventional SDLC approach visualized below:

From eCommerce development to its deployment and release, each process is placed in a line. The sequential SDLC approach means that a prior phase requires to be completed before proceeding to the next one.

Since a continuous feedback loop does not connect Devs, Ops, and QA specialists, accurate technical and business requirements must be defined upfront. In the real world, that is equivalent to the impossible task of predicting the ever-evolving future scenario with complete accuracy.

The SDLC approach doesn’t account for ongoing changes or facilitate collaboration between Devs, Ops, and QA.

So, how it is a big issue for eCommerce companies? The reason lies in the fact that market trends evolve rapidly and with that minimal predictability or upfront warning indications.

An increase in market competition with time shows that customers do not wait for eCommerce portals to get it right. Instead, they switch to better alternatives available in the market.

And this is what the goal of DevOps is. Consider the DevOps approach that connects each phase of the SDLC:

The quick, iterative, and agile development process focuses on quick delivery of the new product features with low difficulty to manage. The changes are completely responsive to market requirements.

  • Cultural Shift

DevOps implementation can have as many variations as entities that embrace the practice. However, SDLC methodology is not all about the tooling. It is also about people and processes.

If the entities culture facilitates collaboration, and individuals adopt shared outcomes instead of merely “tossing the coin over the wall” when their work is done, the DevOps culture of shared responsibility will survive.

If we talk about an ideal DevOps world, then organizational teams see no silos and operated autonomously. Automation and tooling are used to incorporate cultural enhancements through cross-functional collaboration and feedback.

Defects are recognized quicker as Devs work closely with QA and the product is created in line with market requirements through ongoing collaboration.

For eCommerce organizations, these changes lead to a rich and operational online end-user experience that encourages customers to find the right products and make purchases conveniently. The website is created from the ground up to boast high-performance capabilities as the business, product catalog, traffic, and features scale exponentially.

Since eCommerce market dynamics are in a continuous state of evolution, eCommerce organizations must align product development and technology goals with the business aims. If a high-performance online service feature is not useful to end-users, the organization must innovate with agility and speed to fulfill customer demands effectively.

  • Ensure Cooperation among team members

In order to understand this point, we can take an instance of one of the eCommerce hosting providers that is Shopify which has achieved an advantage with the potency of the DevOps.

Shopify supports various kinds of merchants. And this is well known that it is a little tricky to be in contact with each and every merchant. In order to solve this issue, Shopify planned to embrace DevOps in late 2015. Consequently, they found a remarkable positive result by late 2016.

DevOps approach helps an organization to ensure cooperation team members. This approach leads to higher productivity and performance.

  • Smart Automation

Automation is quite critical to DevOps success but, at the same time, entities should recognize that there is more to DevOps than automated everything. The purpose of automation in DevOps is to set up consistent builds in stable environments.

Organizations can deploy next-generation automated configuration management solutions, but without overreaching visibility into legacy technologies and processes. For example, systems are not likely to perform as intended. Essentially, entities should know what to automate and what not to automate in the context of their technical and business needs.

eCommerce companies that excel in these areas realize unprecedented business benefits while also experiencing enhancements within the organization. For example, automation done right will reduce the workload on Dev and QA teams, enhance cross-functional collaboration between Dev and Ops, align product development with business strategies, reduce costs, and enhance service reliability.

Automation can offer frameworks for eCommerce businesses to follow a systematic approach to replace waste processes with quicker, agile and DevOps enabled software release cycles.

However, organizations also understand that automation in DevOps is more than just infrastructure as a code.

Wrapping Up

Hence, the DevOps approach of continuous innovation with the help of smart automation practices and cultural shift empowers companies to achieve these aims and make the most out of the volatile online business landscape.

Moreover, this is quite clear that DevOps can play a major role in the eCommerce industries because eCommerce industries are one of the fastest-growing industries that are required to keep their customers up to date.

Apart from that, this article helps you to become aware that in how many ways this DevOps process is helping eCommerce development company in India to keep their customers as well as merchants happy with the help of its agile method.

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Author

Varun Bhagat

Varun Bhagat

PixelCrayons

I am a technology geek and work with PixelCrayons as a Sr. Technology Consultant. I possess in-depth knowledge of different web development technology and helps my clients to choose the best technology as per their needs.

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