Serverless Architecture for E-commerce
The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated already rapid e-commerce growth, as more consumers shopped from home and businesses moved their offerings online. In fact, global e-commerce retail sales are already past the $4 trillion annual mark1 and are expected to surpass $7 trillion by 2025.2 And it’s estimated that nearly one-fifth of all retail purchases are conducted over the internet.3 That’s just on the B2C side. Believe it or not, the B2B e-commerce market is estimated to be more than five times larger.4
To drive that kind of volume and growth and handle the avalanche of data it produces, e-commerce applications need supporting platforms that are highly scalable, always available, reliable, secure, and ultra-responsive. That’s why many e-commerce companies are turning to serverless solutions.
Serverless is a fully managed, cloud-based approach that allows you to run e-commerce applications without the administrative tasks associated with provisioning, managing, maintaining, or scaling infrastructure. Serverless databases allocate and scale compute and storage resources automatically and elastically with demand. Outsourcing these responsibilities to third-party cloud providers allows you to focus on your core business and build the best possible e-commerce applications and experiences for your customers.
Understanding e-commerce applications
After reviewing the components and requirements of e-commerce applications, you’ll see why a serverless architecture makes sense.
Components of e-commerce applications
E-commerce applications have lots of moving parts. Whether they’re bundled together in a single platform or operate as separate pieces of software, they must all flawlessly work together to provide the kind of high-quality experiences customers expect.
Here are some of the key pieces that make up e-commerce applications:
Content management: Content management systems (CMSs) provide the flexibility to quickly create, edit, and publish new website content, with no coding necessary. That capability has proven to be essential at many e-commerce companies that need to regularly make copy and layout updates to their product pages, blog, home page, and more.
Product catalog management: Without a strong product catalog management solution in place, product data can quickly become a mess. Third-party product data could be flowing in, with a wide variety of formats. At the same time, you might need to send your own product data to another sales channel, like Amazon, in a specific format they require. Strong product catalog management is needed to keep track of it all and ensure easy-to-find, accurate, and consistent product data is found across all sales channels.
Customer Management: With customer relationship management (CRM) software, you can keep customer information organized, while staying on top of sales opportunities. It plays a key role in the communication and follow-up necessary to keep current customers happy, advance deals with prospects, and manage partnerships.
Cart Management: Whether online, a mobile device, or a tablet, e-commerce shopping carts are the last step in the purchase process. If a customer experiences friction, they could simply abandon their order. So, solid cart management software needs to be in place that is reliable, while making the process easy and fast. Top e-commerce shopping cart solutions do much more than just serve as modern cash registers. They also store and display product information, give the customer the ability to quickly add or remove items, select payment and delivery options, and much more.
Payment Management: If you don’t get paid, you don’t have a business. Payment management systems facilitate online and mobile transactions. You’ll want one that makes things easy for you and your customers. Payment options for your customers should go way beyond just credit cards. These systems also serve as the payment gateway, connecting the payment information your customer enters at check-out to the payment processor. From there, the customer is verified, and money is deposited into your company’s account.
Inventory Management: Inventory management systems provide real-time visibility into the quantity, location, and pricing of the products currently available. They allow you to monitor and track inventory, so you’ll know when to reorder and avoid running out of stock. These systems also house sourcing and shipping information for each product. They increase efficiency and reduce operational costs, while shining a light on important metrics, such as product sales numbers and fluctuating customer demand, as well as purchasing and seasonal trends.
Reporting Management: With effective e-commerce reporting, data is gathered across channels into a format that allows you to track key metrics for your business. You’ll be able to quickly assess which campaigns, channels, and products are driving traffic, conversions, and revenue. From there, you can gain insights that lead to more informed, data-based decisions and adjustments to your e-commerce strategy.
Requirements for e-commerce applications
Let’s take a look at what’s required to make all those e-commerce components work together without a glitch:
Scalability: Your database needs to seamlessly scale to meet peak demand so opportunities aren’t missed, then scale back down when business slows to avoid a wasteful use of resources and unnecessary costs. Built-in scalability also allows you to accommodate the constant flow of multi-channel product data and gives you the flexibility to add new features to your e-commerce applications any time they’re needed.
Experience: To be competitive, your e-commerce applications should deliver an individualized experience to each customer that corresponds to their preferences, behavior, and location. Drive customer loyalty and advocacy with highly responsive, reliable, and personally tailored responses to each customer interaction.
Security: Airtight protection for your customer and business data is a top priority. Advanced security features, like identity and access management (IAM), authentication, fraud detection, encryption, auditing, compliance, and more, need to be built into the database solution you choose. The last thing you want is for your company to be in the headlines after a major data breach.
Control: Look for a solution that ensures you’ll have data autonomy, so you can retain complete ownership and control of your data. Data is one of your company’s most valuable assets and you can’t afford to have it locked into a particular application or cloud provider. You need the ability to move it around at your own discretion.
Performance: When customers or prospects visit your e-commerce website or use your app, they expect near real-time responsiveness across all touchpoints. If things lag just for a second or two, they may get frustrated and leave. So, your e-commerce database needs to be built to handle a large influx of traffic, while continuing to provide extremely low-latency, ultra-quick interactions, and a superior experience for your customers.
Flexibility: The best serverless databases are multi-cloud, giving you the flexibility to easily migrate from one cloud to the next. You need a solution that can be deployed in any environment. Where and how your e-commerce applications are hosted should always be your decision. It’s also important to implement a platform with a flexible schema, so you can integrate a wide variety of data from multiple sources. After all, e-commerce systems are complex, containing everything from product catalogs to customer data applications, to fraud detection systems, recommendation engines, shopping carts, and clickstream analysis. And each application has different data model requirements. That’s why your e-commerce serverless database should be flexible enough to support many different data models, including key-value, document, tabular, and graph.
Availability: If your e-commerce site or application is down, you’ll take a direct hit to revenue, while frustrating customers who may never give you a second chance. That’s why it’s critical to have 100 percent uptime. Make sure the solution you choose is highly available, with data distributed across multiple data centers and cloud regions with advanced replication functionality and disaster recovery functionality built in. The database should store redundant copies of data across all participating nodes in a database cluster. Then, if any node in a cluster goes down, one or more copies of its data will still be available on other machines.
Now, let’s see why a serverless approach is a great fit to handle e-commerce’s numerous components and common requirements.
Benefits of serverless for e-commerce applications
Customers expect speed and convenience when shopping on any device, whether that be their computer, phone, or tablet. They want consistent, high-quality experiences across all the channels they use to engage with a brand, whether that’s online, in the store, or using a mobile app on the go. And if the service lags or goes down, they likely won’t remain a customer for long. Imagine what would happen if a major retailer’s online store crashed on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Previously loyal customers would likely lose trust and leave in droves, along with potentially millions in lost revenue. E-commerce companies and online retailers can’t afford to let that happen. They need a database solution that can meet huge swings in demand without any snags, while providing customers with the snappy, responsive experience they demand.
For these reasons, more e-commerce companies are moving to serverless databases. It allows them to outsource areas where it’s tough to differentiate and, therefore, shouldn’t be spending their time, such as operations, scalability, and security. That way, they can turn their attention to where they can actually separate themselves—the front-end and enhancing the brand experience. To support those efforts, serverless databases provide the real-time prowess needed to power personalized content, recommendation engines, and tailored promotions. Serverless also provides the sophisticated communication backbone needed to support the numerous and growing options customers have today, such as in-store pickups, home delivery, product bundling options, and many more.
Serverless databases provide a platform for innovation and agility. They’re built for rapid application prototyping and can dramatically decrease time to market. E-commerce and retail developers flourish in this environment while focusing on crafting the most engaging and beneficial apps possible for their customers.
However, the ability to scale automatically and effortlessly to meet any change in traffic is perhaps the biggest benefit serverless databases provide e-commerce companies. Once a serverless database is in place, the days of worrying about meeting the taxing demands of peak periods are permanently in the rear-view mirror. Scaling up and down to only use the resources needed at any given time is also much more efficient and cost-effective. Teams that implement serverless databases have maintenance and operational concerns removed, along with associated headcount and hardware costs. Instead, they only pay for what they use and only when the servers are running. Serverless databases also guarantee always-on availability, even on the biggest shopping days of the year.
Getting started with serverless e-commerce
E-commerce applications are multilayered and complex, with a multitude of moving pieces and a long list of requirements. Adopting a serverless architecture can help you get a handle on things, while exceeding customer expectations—which seem to be growing just as fast as the e-commerce market itself.
To get started, learn about DataStax’s multi-cloud, multi-model serverless database, Astra DB, and try it for free.
Also, make sure to take a look at the benefits a serverless architecture can provide financial services and IoT applications.
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[1] Stephanie Chevalier, “Global retail e-commerce sales 2014-2024,” Statista, July 7, 2021.
[2] “Global E-commerce Sales (2019-2025),” Oberlo.
[3] “E-commerce Share of Retail Sales (2019-2025),” Oberlo.
[4] "B2B E-commerce 2021,” Statista, October 2021.