The best digital commerce Platform with Google Cloud

You need a next-gen digital commerce platform if you’re a retailer. In that case, you’ve found the proper place to be! In this article, we will go through three distinct approaches to updating your Google Cloud-based e-commerce platform. There is no single correct answer. In the end, you can implement a fully upgraded platform in whatever order that makes the most sense for your team and existing infrastructure.

Customers may browse, compare, and buy products with minimal human assistance thanks to digital commerce platform. The supply of development content, analytics, promotion, pricing, customer acquisition and retention, and the customer experience at every point in the customer’s purchase journey are all components of the customer experience management system.

The full cycle of buying and selling a product or service via digital means is referred to as digital commerce platform. Everything before and after an online transaction is included in this broader concept. Included in this category are activities such as market and customer research, data analytics, and supply chain management.

How does digital commerce Platform work?

The first time a consumer interacts with a brand or product online is the beginning of the digital commerce relationship. They might come upon an ad for the brand on one of their favorite social media platforms, the brand’s domain name in a Google search, or a product listing on a price comparison website.

Think about a customer who prefers to shop on Amazon. Customer search results on their site are tailored to each individual user based on a sophisticated algorithm. In some cases, the order in which products appear to a given client may vary greatly from that of another customer, based on factors such as the latter’s location, purchasing history, and other similar factors.

Analytics are utilized to improve product advertising, website presentation, and even customer service and response time based on previous purchases. More important than the actual logistics of moving goods from A to B is the way in which data is collected and used to enhance the e-commerce operation in real time.

Online shopping vs. traditional shopping

What we call “e-commerce” refers to the practice of trading products and services via the Internet, typically through a website specifically designed for that purpose. The term “digital commerce platfomr” can refer to a wide variety of business models, with e-commerce representing only a small fraction of the total.

What we call “digital commerce platform” today encompasses the whole range of activities and tools that help take customers from “acquire” to “retain” in the marketing cycle. Consider search engine optimization (SEO) to boost a website’s position in Google’s search results, retargeted advertising to promote products to users who have visited (and left) your website, payment technologies, and the logistical engineering that speeds up and more efficiently delivers a product from a warehouse to a customer’s home.

The term “digital commerce platform” is broad enough to include the next generation of e-commerce, which will take the customer’s journey and purchasing experience far beyond the traditional “click to purchase” model and into the realms of augmented reality (AR) shopping and digital shopping assistants, among other things.

Evolutions in online shopping

There is a perpetual cycle of change in both the internet and digital commerce platform. As an example of current tendencies in the market, consider :

• Personalization. Cookies, little snippets of code that let websites “remember” its users and so customise content for them, changed the online customer experience. Customers today want a personalized experience, with 88% saying they are more likely to buy from firms that offer such services.
• Products that allow for user interaction. Augmented and virtual reality are being used by online merchants as additional touchpoints for customers. Virtual fitting rooms using augmented reality could be used by online clothes merchants, for instance.
• Management of stock. Even if advances in technology have helped reduce other costs for online merchants, stocking inventory is still a major drain on profits. In order to fulfill online consumer purchases, major retailers like Target and Walmart now use sophisticated algorithms to locate product inventories in brick-and-mortar stores across the country. Having a warehouse inventory that is kept in a separate location from the retail store’s inventory is an unnecessary and costly duplication. Huge e-commerce platforms like Alibaba Express, on the other hand, connect producers and consumers directly, obviating the need for extensive storage space.
• Market integration. The fragmentation of the consumer experience is a direct result of the many channels available in digital commerce platform. As a potential solution to this problem, integrated marketing has emerged as an attractive option. The best way for firms to stand out in today’s fragmented digital landscape is to provide a consistent experience across all customer touchpoints with unified marketing creative.

Headless commerce

It’s possible that as a merchant, you’d like to have complete creative control over the front end in order to offer a one-of-a-kind shopping experience, while relying on standardized commerce building blocks to handle the back end operations like product cataloging and checkout, as well as pricing, promotions, shipping, and customer accounts. A headless commerce strategy simplifies tasks like:

You can make changes to the site’s front end (for example, to manage seasonal promotions) without requiring expertise in the back end’s processing and without worrying about breaking anything.

• Capture first-party data from interactions with customers, analyze it for patterns in their shopping habits, and utilize that information to power data-driven, personalized products and services that are more likely to result in purchases.
• Improve the user experience by rapidly implementing changes to the interface without compromising security or other norms.
• Updating the front end should not affect the overall performance or the client’s experience.

Use Google Cloud Commerce to create your own e-commerce platform.

The build-it-yourself method entails putting together a solution from scratch using Google Cloud’s available resources, such as AI/ML tools and data management resources. You can use this strategy in three primary ways:

You can a. move your current setup directly to Google Cloud from your on-premises server, without making any changes to the solution itself. Because of this, you can move to the cloud with fewer disruptions, but you lose out on the advantages of a microservices architecture.
Improve your current solution while migrating it to a microservices design in Google Cloud, using containers and managed services. There will be more tweaks necessary when using this method compared to simply moving over the current solution.

The advantages of a cloud-native, containerized design, such as reduced maintenance burden, more adaptability, and scalability, are well worth the effort of making the transition. If you’re looking to upgrade and migrate your e-commerce platform to GKE, this sample architecture should help.

c) Completely update the building’s design. Supposing you’ve made the switch to Google Cloud and are now utilizing GKE or Compute Engine, etc. Perhaps you are constructing a brand-new, cutting-edge business infrastructure from the ground up. To get to a fully containerized microservices architecture that keeps up with modern times, how would you get there? Okay, so the video gives you the full rundown on the structure, but here’s the gist of it.
Consider creating the platform with a series of progressively more granular services:

• Presentation layer – Your single-page application (SPA) builder and content. 
• Services Layer – Services such as session, search, account, inventory, orders, and so on.
• Storage layer – Your storage choices for the services. These can vary based on the type of service, for example: CloudSQL or Cloud Spanner for inventory and products, and Firestore for user sessions.
• Cache layer – Your transient cache, which can use Memorystore to access recently queried data without querying the storage layer again. 

The most versatile choice, this design also offers many other advantages, such as letting your business do things like:

• Microservices can be built and scaled on their own to handle traffic spikes while reducing total cost of ownership. The ability to add and roll out new services at any moment without interrupting existing ones is a key feature.
• Set up separate language-specific teams to work on individual services.
• Create a feedback loop between your data platform and your e-commerce platform to learn more about your customers’ habits and provide more tailored services.

Make use of a pre-packaged SaaS offering hosted on Google Cloud.

The ready-made solution leverages a preexisting SaaS offering, such as Shopify or BigCommerce, running on Google Cloud. If you don’t need a lot of tweaking, this method will serve you well. Use Google Cloud services and capabilities, such as Analytics 360, to glean understanding of your clientele and the data created by your solution.