Alibaba Cloud powers the Double 11 Shopping Festival – the world's biggest e-commerce day of the year – responsible for generating over USD $30.8 billion of gross merchandise value (GMV) for retailers in 2018. In our latest whitepaper, we have drawn on the learnings from this massive event to explore how retailers and small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) can use promotional events like Double 11 and Black Friday to boost their bottom line and compete with some of the world's biggest brands on the global e-commerce stage.
Retailers that thrive are ready to scale up to match the surges in traffic that promotional events generate, consider potential security issues in advance and implement data analytics to respond to demand and optimize their site. To do this, they must devise ways to stand out in this crowded space and embrace a range of solutions that will capture the attention of online consumers before, during, and after these key shopping events.
Here are four key stages that retailers and SMEs should follow to be set up for success.
Planning and testing are essential. By embracing big data, you can better forecast and model future demand, and estimate your resource needs accordingly.
The comprehensive range of security solutions offered by Alibaba Cloud can help your business prepare for (and prevent) the worst-case scenario on the busiest days in the online calendar.
Our marketing services and solutions can also help your business create enthusiasm and interest both before and during an event. And our China Gateway service can help you gain a foothold in the dynamic Chinese e-commerce market.
Alibaba Cloud offers your business a wide range of automated solutions to maintain your scalability and availability, no matter how many users come to your website. Our Auto Scaling service automatically adds Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances when demand for your website increases; ApsaraDB for RDS ensures 99.9 percent business availability and automatic failovers if your primary instances are not available; Server Load Balancer (SLB) automatically distributes your traffic among multiple cross-border instances; and our Machine Learning Platform for AI allows you to add automated functionality, such as tailored product recommendations.
During peak periods of activity, it's vital to monitor your usage to ensure the best experience for your customers. Our CloudMonitor service allows you to create metrics and alarms to monitor your usage and E-MapReduce coupled with DataV provides visualized, real-time analysis during key e-commerce events.
Big data analytics and AI are two important and emerging trends in the e-commerce world to help your business stay ahead of the competition.
By leveraging solutions such as our E-MapReduce big data processing solution and our Machine Learning Platform For AI, your business will benefit from a range of proactive solutions and valuable insights.
Standing out in competitive e-commerce promotions takes a great deal of planning, knowledge and expertise. Some businesses assume these measures will be prohibitively expensive, requiring excessive up-front costs and the provisioning of expensive hardware. However, in the cloud, this is not the case. Alibaba Cloud offers a range of cost-effective solutions for businesses that want to scale and capitalize on the tremendous opportunities of these large-scale e-commerce events.
To learn more, download our whitepaper Successful E-Commerce Promotions – an Alibaba Cloud Guide for SMEs now.
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Raja_KT March 21, 2019 at 2:50 pm
I think once an SME has a good hang of all Alibaba Cloud products, it is just like mapping business to technology.