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Community Blog Introducing Intelligent Retail: The Next Revolution for E-Commerce

Introducing Intelligent Retail: The Next Revolution for E-Commerce

In this blog, we'll examine the basics of intelligent retail and introduce Alibaba Cloud's range of intelligent solutions for retailers.

The Alibaba Cloud 2021 Double 11 Cloud Services Sale is live now! For a limited time only you can turbocharge your cloud journey with core Alibaba Cloud products available from just $1, while you can win up to $1,111 in cash plus $1,111 in Alibaba Cloud credits in the Number Guessing Contest.

Find out more about how the cloud powers The Technologies behind the Biggest Global Shopping Festival in our latest whitepaper.

Data is the new corporate currency and the amount generated during an event like the Double 11 Global Shopping Festival is phenomenal.

By the end of the 2019 event, 970PB of data had been processed and close to 1.3 billion orders were generated. In 2020, the Cainiao network processed more than 2.3 billion orders.

Retailers are now starting to analyze their data in new and effective ways, both retrospectively and in real-time. This new era of intelligent retail is helping savvy businesses rise above the competition and the cloud sits at the heart of this phenomenon. Let’s examine the basics of intelligent retail now.

Get the Basics Right

Retailers need an end-to-end data solution. At Alibaba Cloud, our Big Data Consulting Services for Retail is a first-class big data consulting service, helping businesses embrace retail digitization within a matter of weeks.

We also provide a range of big data technologies. MaxCompute, for example, is a fast and fully hosted GB/TB/PB level data warehouse solution, which can support your offline big data computing activities.

During Double 11, our AnalyticDB data analytics service also ran in conjunction with PolarDB, for quick and precise real-time data analysis.

Embrace the IoT

Our IoT Platform is a device management platform, providing businesses with an intuitive way to implement two-way communication between end devices and the cloud.

As a result, you can gather information from a diverse network of assets and use that data to make better decisions to optimize your business.

During Double 11, information about every package was uploaded directly to our IoT Platform, allowing deliveries to be traced from origin to destination, expediting deliveries.

That’s not all. There are many ways in which the IoT can help retail businesses. Cainiao, for example, is the logistics arm of the Alibaba Group and it uses IoT technologies to securely open and close its delivery lockers, which has facilitated deliveries to remote, rural locations.

Enable Omnichannel

An omnichannel retail strategy provides customers with a seamless, continuous and highly personalized shopping experience, connecting users across multiple touchpoints. As a result, retailers can create highly personalized and impactful shopping experiences.

Our Omnichannel Data Mid-End solution, for example, can help retailers boost their brand and customer experience using cloud-based technologies including Dataphin, Quick Audience and Quick BI.

Dataphin is a PaaS platform allowing businesses to unify their data assets across different data sources and storage environments. Using Quick Audience, businesses benefit from a range of rich consumer analytics insights, multi-channel connectivity and audience targeting.

Quick BI can further boost your analytic capabilities. It’s incredibly simple to use, where data portals provide you with everything you need to understand performance, perform analytics, explore additional data sets, and generate insightful reports on customer trends using drag-and-drop features.

Introducing Blockchain

Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) is a new cloud-based solution, helping organizations further streamline their operations.

Blockchain is a digital ledger with no central authority, instead relying on member participation for consensus and verification. It can drive efficiencies across your business, removing the need for intermediaries and helping you massively streamline your existing operations.

It introduces a range of new, potential services to retailers. Tamper-proof digital documents, micro payments and digital identities and certificates, for example, are now easy to implement using blockchain-based services.

To summarize, a range of intelligent solutions now exist for retailers. The cloud enables these data-driven technologies, helping businesses rise above the competition and meet growing customer demands in our increasingly digital world.

Discover More

Alibaba Cloud is a world-class cloud provider with extensive experience in the e-commerce industry. To find out more about our work during Double 11, download our new whitepaper The Technologies behind the Biggest Global Shopping Festival.

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