Top Three Requirements for eCommerce Success 

eCommerce sales for 2021 will be more than $147 billion greater than forecast before the pandemic. If you are not already invested in a robust e-commerce solution, you will need to get started to survive in the pandemic economy. Many companies initially jumped into ecommerce with a low-cost platform but found that it can’t handle the number of transactions. If companies cannot keep up with the growing number of transactions, they will miss out on sales and customers, limiting their business’s growth.  

The exponential increase in online transactions is driving a significant need for powerful enterprise class databases to help support these eCommerce platforms. In addition, cross-platforming has become necessary with the amount of complex data coming from different online channels. Of course, having a single eCommerce platform will not ensure success, but it’s a good start.  

Running an eCommerce business is not easy. Having a store and offerings to sell does not mean that people will flock in and buy your products. However, there are a few things you can do to try to ensure your company will be a success. 

As enterprises are ramping up for more transactions, let us kick things off by reviewing three key elements to eCommerce successes.  

1. 1. High Availability is Critical: With High Availability (in short: HA), technology vendors indicate a system that guarantees the highest possible availability. Downtime can be catastrophic. Online customers do not observe closing times. They will always want to have access to their favorite portals and platforms at any time or they will go elsewhere. With high availability, customers can place their orders with confidence, any time and happy customers will come back and repeat the process, translating to revenue growth. Most online consumers will not wait until you are ‘open’ again to buy from a particular business. Opening hours are obsolete online. They belong to the brick-and-mortar, not to today’s fast-growing world of online transactions. Bottom line: Lack of high availability means unhappy customers and less revenue. 
   2. Powerful Performance: Did you know that conversion rates on eCommerce sites are a key performance indicator? It’s no secret that a fast eCommerce site with a great user experience (UX) makes shoppers happy and happy shoppers are more likely to convert. There are many things that can slow down an eCommerce website such as customer personalized suggestions, ratings, reviews, videos, large digital assets, which are all meant to create an awesome user experience but can hurt your eCommerce platform speed if not implemented correctly. The way to fix these issues is by having an eCommerce solution that is blazingly fast – sub-second storefront page load performance to help you sell more, faster. Add to that performance with advanced data replication between data centers, and you will have many happy customers. An eCommerce platform with the best performing cloud native offering is the way to go! 
   3. Superior Backup and Restore Capabilities: eCommerce website backups and restores are like the insurance of online business. To ensure your online store is fully protected, your eCommerce platform and database should provide the ability to quickly archive and restore persistent data from and to different storage locations and devices. And in a Cloud Native deployment, have the ability to generate database logs on Kubernetes managed persistent storage, allowing it to survive restart and enable fast recovery.   

Sweat the small stuff. Details are crucial to the success of your data and commerce future. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers and work backward to reverse engineer how your commerce and data strategies are working. Think human first, and then focus on how your software is supporting your business goals. Consider scalability, backups, cloud native solutions, and how selling more faster can grow your business. 

One way to energize your eCommerce solution is by having the HCL OneDB database as part of your eCommerce platform. HCL OneDB is a cloud native enterprise database that can help accelerate your digital transformation across your organization. OneDB offers the versatility, reliability, and ease-of-use needed to address today’s data management and application development challenges.  

Want details on how to achieve more transaction success with eCommerce? Visit the OneDB and the Commerce webpages for more information.