Today’s omni-channel commerce environment is very sophisticated, which is why it’s surprising that some leading brands are still missing the mark when it comes to the ongoing evolution of their digital existence.
Instead of embracing the innovative, constantly developing ethos of commerce, there remain some national and global brands that restrict themselves and their opportunities by launching distinct one-off projects, or a number of projects for specific technologies and integrations.
This happens because a business case has been made for a new website, or a shop launch, or for a platform migration, so each one is treated as an individual project with an end-point and a hotly anticipated return on investment. That return is expected to include ongoing results, long into the future, upon which the reputation of the CMO, CIO, CTO or head of eCommerce lies.
But how does that approach fit into a world where continuous innovation is increasingly an integral part of the day-to-day; where a brand’s digital existence can and should flourish and expand seamlessly across web, mobile, social and store channels?
Fortunately, these instances are diminishing as mindsets change; they have to, as does the need to own innovation. More traditional retailers are operating in the same space as brands like Etsy who have established a fundamental ability to deploy not just new content but new code and underlying services to their online services many times a day. They avoid the commercial and reputational risk of big-bang deployments and continuously improve and measure their customer engagement and success of their proposition.
One of the major factors influencing the approach of brands is the development of cloud-hosted environments. These have grown in popularity in recent years with brands attracted by the considerable cost savings they can make and the scalability and flexibility that commodity infrastructure provides, ensuring they can meet the growing demands of their digital-savvy ‘always-on’ customers.
These don’t always have to be commerce-based. A great example of this is the work we have been doing for Nissan’s Helios digital project. Helios is focused on empowering Nissan’s customers during their automotive decision-making journey and to this end we have been creating a huge, flexible deployment architecture to support all the Nissan brands. The platform serves over 200 digital sites in 100 international markets. The product and tool set can evolve rapidly in response to market changes and customer tastes and opinions, but the key focus is on the platform’s responsiveness across every digital touch point.
Platform models are now evolving to help brands not only meet consumer expectations, but to exceed them. Amazon Cloud, is a service that delivers infrastructure to quickly enable organisations to run and scale a wide range of applications very economically.
Specifically for online retailers, DemandWare provides an entirely cloud based solution that solves the pain of scaling while supporting rapid and continuous improvement and innovation. The core services of the platform are upgraded and added to roughly every month and clients can spend more of their time focusing on marketing, merchandising, content and driving up conversion – rather than constantly having to deal with the plumbing! In 2015 clients using DemandWare experienced an average GMV growth across all channels of 26%.
One of the great benefits of today’s cutting edge cloud hosted environments is that they can empower brands to keep pace with the dynamic commerce marketplace, even during peak trading periods. Brands are now looking to their commodity infrastructure partner to ensure their platform is seamlessly upgraded without any disruption to their operations.
This is important because an always available, always evolving online commercial presence is now arguably a brand’s most important asset and it demands constant nurturing to help it progress and evolve. It is the store-front on every digital interface, always open, and potentially delivering the biggest customer base.
Today’s fast moving omni-channel environment means brands must invest in processes that treat continuous integration, quality assurance, testing automation, deployment automation and the whole ‘from requirements to deployed code’ dev-ops approach as a fundamental element of their capability.
A successful, dynamic digital presence is not a bricks and mortar store and assumptions should not be made about build timescales or ROIs once the doors have opened. The best, most responsive ecommerce sites change rapidly, so developers never write the same code twice and no development team ever duplicates a delivery model in any significant aspect.
With the support of a solid platform brands can work with their partners to get new site sections, features and capabilities deployed frequently as small releases avoid risking stability, performance or conversion. Couple frequent small releases with solid analytics and an A/B testing regime a brand can actually know that they will commercially out-perform their previous incumbent offering.
It won’t be long before all brands and retailers are confidently going live at a time of their choosing with new feature sets to underline their innovation and differentiate them from their competition. Then they will all be in control of their digital destiny.
By Paul Smith, Head of Commerce Business Development, DigitasLBi Commerce
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