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Site Outages Shine the Light on Retail Weak Spots During Holiday Season

By Claude Robinson, Oracle

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With the kick-off of
the holiday shopping season now in the rearview mirror, retailers have already
learned some important lessons—ones that hit the bottom line of some of the
biggest brands in the business. Brand names like Walmart, J. Crew, lululemon,
Lowe’s, Best Buy, and Office Depot found out the hard way that their websites were
unprepared for the flood of online shoppers on Black Friday through Cyber
Monday.

Walmart’s 150-minute
site outage
on the Wednesday
before Thanksgiving affected an estimated 3.6 million shoppers and resulted in somewhere
in the neighborhood of $9 million in lost sales. Besides the immediate monetary
impact, the frustrating shopping experience could cost more down the road as
unhappy customers spread the word to friends and across social media sites.

According to CIO
Dive
, these site outages are
typically the result of overburdened APIs, slow third-party functions,
graphics-heavy sites, failure to accurately assess regional performance levels
and—most often—servers that just can’t handle the peak traffic.

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Prepare For Peak Traffic

Retailers know that
it’s technology that’s behind their ability to keep pace with the increasing
demands of today’s shoppers. To be able to deliver the real-time, responsive,
personalized shopping experience consumers expect, retailers must have in place
the IT infrastructure that supports it. Making sure systems can keep pace
with peak consumer traffic is just one important aspect, but one that becomes imperative
during periods like the Black Friday through Cyber Monday crunch.

Although it’s
inevitable that sometimes even the biggest brands will experience IT glitches
during peak traffic times, there are steps that enterprises can take to
minimize the possibility. One of the best ways to avoid website outages is to select
infrastructure that scales. While traditional IT servers have limited capacity,
if you have an engineered system that was built to support your database, the
result could be up to 94% less unplanned downtime. And we all know, in retail,
downtime means lost revenue.  

After implementing
Oracle Exadata, retailer Target has been able to improve system stability and roll
out in-store pickup from its online site in fewer than three months. And that means
creating a better customer experience.

Retailer Tractor
Supply Co.
is another retailer
that has benefited from moving its infrastructure to Oracle. Uptime problems
disappeared on the Exadata database platform and has given the company the
ability to grow organically with little or no impact to operations, according
to Technology Manager Drew Diamond.

Cloud-Ready Infrastructure
Should Be The Goal Of Every Retailer

While moving to the
cloud has many benefits, retail CIOs know that moving 100 percent to the cloud
isn’t realistic, or even necessarily ideal. But to be able to manage the
enormous amounts of data for comprehensive analytics, customer experience
enhancement, inventory and supply change management, and—not least of all—transaction
processing, the IT infrastructure needs to be nimble enough to handle workloads
both in the cloud and on-premises and as the workloads move back and forth
between both.

Cloud-ready
infrastructure gives retailers the flexibility they need to meet all the
challenges of the fast-paced, competitive retail environment. When retailers
choose engineered systems that provide equivalent data infrastructure on-premises
and in the cloud, they gain the ability to migrate seamlessly to the cloud
whenever they are ready—or move workloads back and forth between on-premises
and cloud as needed to optimize performance. They can even choose a
third option
of keeping some
workloads in the data center but using vendor-provided infrastructure, vendor
management services, and a cost-effective, subscription-based cloud model. It’s
basically dropping a cloud environment into the data center, behind the
enterprise’s own firewall.

Engineered
systems
offer additional
benefits beyond cloud readiness. Because every layer of the tech stack is
engineered to work together, they provide the highest query and transaction
processing performance, built-in security at every layer, and high availability—because
the last thing you can afford is to have your systems go down when your
business depends on them.

Leveraging The Cloud Can Help
Ensure Retailers Have A Happy Holiday And New Year

Of course, right
now, we’re all focused on the ability of retailers to make sure their websites
don’t go down during the holidays. But if we take a bigger-picture perspective,
retailers need to prepare for a range of challenges that they must address
during the holiday shopping season and all year long.

Consumer demand for
a seamless and intuitive omnichannel
experience
personalized
expressly for them is one challenge. Business
Wire
reports that over the recent
Thanksgiving weekend, “Omnichannel retailers—those with a physical and online
presence—were overwhelmingly the preferred destination for holiday shoppers,
capturing 88% of spending on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday,
demonstrating once again that having multiple options for consumers to take
advantage of is a winning strategy.”

The customer
experience once inside
the store
must also be personalized
by taking advantage of mobile apps for the consumer and the salesperson.

When consumers make
a purchase, they have greater expectations around getting their purchases that
go beyond shopping at a store and taking their purchases home. They
increasingly expect same-day delivery to their homes or a nearby location when
they order on mobile or online. The digital
supply chain
must adapt to this
“mile after the last mile” mentality. It’s no longer enough to keep adequate
inventory
on the shelves of
brick-and-mortar stores; although, that’s a prerequisite too.

To stay ahead of the
pack, retailers must harness technologies like the latest predictive analytics,
adaptive intelligence and machine learning, the Internet of Things, and
blockchain. And all these technologies are made possible by the cloud and an
unprecedented amount of data that must be processed.

Retailers who still
rely on huge legacy systems need to move quickly. It doesn’t mean that they must
immediately get rid of all their legacy infrastructure and start over. But it
does require moving aggressively to take advantage of the cloud where it makes
sense today and continuing to migrate over time. Investing in cloud-ready
infrastructure that makes the path smoother and easier is a major step toward
making sure this year’s holiday shopping season is bright.


Claude Robinson, Senior Director Product Marketing, is responsible for leading product marketing for cloud and converged infrastructure for Oracle Database and Big Data.

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