The paradigm shift towards digitization has added fuel to online shopping. People hardly get time to buy necessities from a physical store in today’s life. So, E-commerce storefronts have become their best bet, allowing them to shop conveniently from their houses.
- Global E-commerce sales will reach $7.4 trillion by 2025.
- E-commerce will account for 95% of the purchases by 2040.
- The market share of E-commerce in retail sales will become 24.5% by 2025.
So, the E-commerce sector will grow leaps and bounds in the next decade or so. That’s where the online storefront engineering team got to ensure high availability, stability, lower maintenance, a strong feedback pipeline, and a shorter release cycle.
DevOps is one methodology that can enable you to achieve all these aspects with utmost ease. This blog will analyze how DevOps implementation can transform your E-commerce business. We will discuss the benefits that DevOps brings to E-commerce and dive deep into the best practices one needs to follow for successful DevOps implementation in E-commerce.
Benefits that DevOps brings to E-commerce
1. Increase in productivity
DevOps implementation brings development and operations teams together to overcome the departments’ barriers. Every team will regularly collaborate to achieve the goal. Everyone will have an idea of what others are doing, so you can shorten the development/deployment process. It will also enable you to increase productivity and release new products quicker.
2. Upliftment in customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is the key to success for any business, which also applies to the E-commerce industry. With DevOps, you can improve software delivery and ensure high-quality products, thus increasing customer satisfaction. In addition to all these, DevOps also provides a bug-free and robust product/software that will help you to enhance the customer experience.
3. Quick response to changing demands
Customer behavior is something that no one can predict with utmost precision and accuracy. Therefore, you have to adapt to changing customer demands and change the ecosystem. DevOps is one methodology that enables you to roll out new features and adapt to changing customer behavior. Thus, your business stays relevant and competitive for a long time.
4. Innovation and transformation
With DevOps’ help, you can implement the innovative solution and deploy it faster. Furthermore, the methodology allows E-commerce businesses to create new features quickly and launch the upgraded version with less time-to-market. DevOps will also enable you to transform your business model and take it to the next level without compromising quality.
Now, you must have got an idea of the benefits that DevOps can bring to your E-commerce business. However, to avail of these benefits, you need to ensure successful DevOps implementation in your E-commerce business. For this purpose, you can follow some best practices that we will analyze in our upcoming section.
Best practices for DevOps implementation in E-commerce
1. Infrastructure automation
Manual processes contradict the idea of DevOps and can lead to unexpected failures, loss of money, and downfall of customer loyalty as the service can remain unavailable for a long time. As an owner of an E-commerce company, when you’re planning to adopt DevOps methodology, you should give due importance to automation in the workflow process/pipeline.
Here are some of the significant benefits that you get with infrastructure automation:
- Ability to make changes quickly
- Reduction in infrastructure management cost
- Decrease in error with less human intervention
- Acceleration of delivery with contemporary tools
- Allows you to analyze data for future enhancements
- Optimum utilization of available resources
Remember that you can’t automate every process, but whenever possible, try to automate as it ensures consistent and stable build for the E-commerce businesses.
2. Continuous integration and delivery
If you want to stay relevant in today’s market, your business must follow agile development practices. It would allow you to launch your products quicker and gain a competitive edge. With the help of CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Delivery), you can design a pipeline that enables real-time feedback and improves product quality while decreasing the time-to-market.
Here are some of the other vital benefits of CI/CD:
- No need to pause the development lifecycle at the time of release
- You can automate the deployment cycle for small changes
- Ensures fewer bugs and a robust product
- Less chance of a complete breakdown
- Enables the frequent release of new features
3. Automate system testing
In any E-commerce web site, there is real-time traffic 24*7, and therefore, you can’t afford a buggy functionality or a breakdown of the system. Furthermore, it could affect the shopping experience and the transaction process, which leads to a massive loss of money.
To ensure that you don’t have to face such situations, you must impose stringent and rigorous testing procedures. That’s where automation testing comes in handy, as it allows you to run and implement continuous testing whenever there’s an update or upgrade in the system.
4. Give importance to E-commerce security
Whenever you’re dealing with any E-commerce web site, you need to put a lot of emphasis on the security aspect. Millions of shoppers visit online storefronts daily, and many of them would go to checkout pages and complete their purchases.
So, the money factor and the personal information get involved, and thus, security is a significant concern. DevOps gives a lot of importance to security, and so, by implementing DevOps for enterprises related to E-commerce, you can ensure a high level of security.
Here are some things you should consider to ensure the security of your E-commerce business:
- Configuring SSL and TLS correctly
- Creating regular backups of your data
- Automatic server configuration and upgrade
- Storing logs related to infrastructure and application
- Implementing role-based access control
- Applying two-factor authentication
- Encrypting sensitive data
Summing up
The E-commerce sector will grow exponentially and evolve more rapidly than any other industry in the next few years. With so many options available, fulfilling the customer’s demand has become a significant challenge for online retailers. Availability, higher uptime, reliability, security, scalability, flexibility, etc., are needs of the art in today’s fast-paced environment.
With the help of DevOps, E-commerce companies can showcase these characteristics. In this blog, we have provided the benefits that DevOps can bring to the table for E-commerce businesses. In addition, we have also covered the best practices that one can follow to implement DevOps for E-commerce and transform their business.
