Success beyond scale Why simply surviving the next demand spike is not enough - Produced by Andrew Jutton Principal Consultant - Retail Connections
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Success beyond scale Why simply surviving the next demand spike is not enough. Produced by Andrew Jutton Principal Consultant
Success beyond scale
Success beyond scale
Why do so many ecommerce businesses fail at As CTOs continue to scale up to meet anticipated
scale? demand, it can be difficult to step back, take a
breath and realise that focusing solely on scale is
Why do retail websites fall over in the face of a limiting strategy. Scale is simply the entry price in
demand that they should have anticipated? today’s ecommerce world.
The retail calendar is full of spikes: Black Friday,
Christmas, January sales, Valentine’s Day, Easter,
Hallowe’en, Golden Week, Singles Day, etc. Yet, too
AT AMIDO, WE WORK WITH
often, simply surviving the next spike dominates IT
thinking for ecommerce leaders. LEADING ECOMMERCE FIRMS,
HELPING THEM TO BUILD
Strategy has boiled down to survival, and avoiding
headlines like those suffered by Dell, Currys PC AND OWN SUSTAINABLE
World and Macy in November 2016.1 COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE BY
There is good reason, of course. Not only does a
EMBRACING THREE ELEMENTS:
crash mean lost sales in the busiest hours of the
year (online firms can take 10% of their annual sales
on Black Friday alone), it also means angry and RESILIENCE AT SCALE
frustrated customers, lost loyalty and a bonus for
competitors.
Even poor performance, short of a complete crash, FLEXIBILITY FOR THE FUTURE
badly impacts business. Research by Dynatrace
found that 75% of mobile users would abandon a
retailer’s mobile site or app if it was slow or prone to
crash. Nearly half of adults would shop elsewhere if
a site failed to load in three seconds.2 DIFFERENTIATION OF EXPERIENCE
But, is survival sufficient? Savvy shoppers are
demanding more:
• 41% of consumers practice showrooming;
combining the online and in-store experience3
• 89% are influenced in their retailer preference In this paper, we explore how forward-thinking
by the availability of real-time information on businesses are addressing these issues in their search
product availability4 to meet customer expectations and to build lasting
• 95% of millennials want brands to “actively advantage.
court” them5
1Why does ecommerce fail at scale?
Why does ecommerce fail at scale?
Every year, the post-Black Friday press is the same: technology of its age. A monolithic design comprises
a string of premium brand websites crashed, losing a self-contained, interconnected piece of software
sales in the most valuable hours of the trading year. that provides a single, comprehensive solution
Angry and frustrated customers take to social media covering every aspect of ecommerce from browsing
to complain, then take their custom elsewhere. to payment and delivery.
Reputations and brands are damaged. Sales and
loyalty are lost.
This year, it was Dell, GAME, Currys PC World and An monolithic application
puts all its functionality into a
Macy’s.6 Problems were reported at retailers New
Look, River Island and Missguided,7 while cash-back SINGLE PROCESS
site Quidco8 and the Royal Mail9 also encountered
issues.
The relative novelty of Black Friday attracts the
media, but the retail year is full of spikes to
survive; from New Year sales, through Valentine’s
Day, Mothers’ Day, Fathers’ Day and a string of
national and international festivals right round to
Thanksgiving and Christmas again. And scales by replicating the
monolith on multiple servers
None of these events is a surprise. So, why can’t
businesses cope with the demand they stoke?
Today, such an approach is widely considered an
“anti-pattern”, the antithesis of good software
The problem of scale is often one of design. However, it has its place and can be ideal for
a single, well-resourced implementation. Written as a
design single piece of code, every step can be optimised to
take advantage of its intended hardware.
Often a system’s inability to cope with demand
spikes is rooted in its outdated architecture. Many That said, the monolithic approach was never
of today’s leading, enterprise-grade, ecommerce intended to scale up to today’s levels of demand and
solutions are built to a traditional software the architecture’s original strength of cohesion has
architecture intended for an era before the massive become its weakness. It lacks the flexibility to meet
scale and flexibility of cloud computing. varying demand by scaling up and down quickly and
easily. Components cannot be scaled independently
Commonly known as monolithic architecture, this of each other and the only answer is to deploy ever
traditional approach evolved to make best use of the larger servers, increasing CPU, memory and storage.
2Why does ecommerce fail at scale?
THIS SCALE UP APPROACH IS
INFLEXIBLE AND INEFFICIENT:
MORE PROCESSING POWER FOR,
SAY, THE TRANSACTION ENGINE
MEANS WASTE AND REDUNDANCY
IN OTHER AREAS: THE SHOPPING
BASKET, DISCOUNTS OR
DELIVERIES.
Platform lock-in
The monolithic approach is inflexible by design and Vendors often require any changes to be made by
inevitably requires a long-term commitment to a their own or nominated consultants and, once you
particular technology stack. they have created your “non-standard” deployment,
you are locked into expensive re-writes every time the
As a result, it can be difficult to take advantage of underlying platform is updated.
emerging technologies (frameworks, programming
languages, etc.). For example, adopting a newer
platform framework might require you to rewrite the
entire application – a decidedly risky undertaking.
3Why does ecommerce fail at scale?
An increasingly complex code-base In recent years, the capacity of discs has improved.
More data can be stored, but it takes an unavoidably
Over time, and with no clear separation between longer time to read and this creates a bottleneck that
different functions within the ecommerce platform, CPU can’t solve.
a monolithic application can become difficult to
understand and modify. As a result, the pace of Geographic distance matters, too. As a retailer,
development slows. And, because it can be difficult your ultimate goal is to deploy your application
to understand how to correctly implement a change, closest to where your customers are situated, but
the quality of the code declines over time, making monolithic design makes this more difficult. It is
failures more likely. more resource intensive and operationally costly to
achieve. If a customer in Australia is pinging your
Because services cannot be deployed independently server in London, latency soon becomes an issue.
of each other, it becomes difficult to practice Performance and the customer experience degrade.
continuous deployment of the application. Innovation
and the deployment of new features slows down.
Supporting different clients – such as desktop
browsers, mobile browsers and native mobile
applications – is also difficult. Just think of the
problems some major brands still have in providing
an acceptable mobile experience.
Inevitably, there are diminishing returns and an
increasing resistance to further development. If every
minor change requires updating the entire code-
base and re-deploying the solution, that can mean
taking your site down for 12-15 hours or more. The
opportunity cost of lost revenue quickly becomes a SCALE-UP
serious barrier to innovation. And, of course, the risk
of error is large.
Risking catastrophic failure
The natural constraints of a Scale Up approach
A further consequence of monolithic design is that
Within a monolithic design, hardware constraints are when one thing fails, everything fails. Implicit in
inevitable. the approach is recognition that any failure will be
a catastrophic event. Catastrophic events result in
Data tiers have traditionally been difficult to scale, expensive downtime.
because a single database stores state for every
part of the solution: discounts, delivery, inventory, Monolithic architecture is, simply, not the best fit
shopping cart, etc. Monolithic design typically lends for today’s high volume, high demand ecommerce
itself to having a single database that represents environment.
the entire application but, as a result, the database
becomes a single point of failure. A different approach is needed.
4Why does ecommerce fail at scale?
CLOUD -FIRST
DESIGN
SCALE-OUT
Cloud-first design
Cloud computing enables a very different approach overall system design into a set of manageable,
to the design, development, operation and independent and loosely coupled services. Each
maintenance of software – a cloud-first approach. service is responsible for managing a part of the
overall ecommerce business domain.
Traditional ecommerce architecture is grounded in
monolithic, server-first thinking. Even as vendors port As a result, services can be resourced and scaled
their solutions to the cloud, the core architecture independently of each other.
often remains monolithic.
Rather than Scale Up, a microservices, cloud-first
However, cloud-first thinking enables microservices design will Scale Out – adding larger numbers of
architecture, the opposite of the monolithic smaller servers where required, rather than fewer,
approach. Microservices deconstruct the larger ones supporting the entire edifice.
5Why does ecommerce fail at scale?
Designed for failure A modular approach means you can choose the best
solution for each service, deciding whether to rent,
Software should be designed and built to anticipate
build or buy for the best return at every point.
and handle failure gracefully. Designing software for
the cloud requires a different approach to traditional
It provides agility too; the ability to adapt as the
software architecture. It requires that the possible
business environment evolves.
unavailability of services, servers and network failures
must all be factored into the design to avoid possible
downtime. Improving local performance
Microservices also make it easy to service and
The microservices approach of splitting the
resource international customers. You can run
architecture into separate services can have a
separate instances of your site in different regions:
positive impact on availability. If the database in a
Australian shopping requests no longer ping your
monolithic solution went offline, the whole site would
UK servers. And, that means you can flex to meet
be offline.
local demand. If Singles Day (November 11th) is
an important date for you, scale up your servers
By contrast, in a microservices design, if, say,
in China. Then scale them down and switch your
the discounts service went offline then only that
resources to the US for Thanksgiving.
functional area would be offline; the rest of the
solution would remain available for the customer.
As a consequence, a cloud-first architecture can be IMPORTANTLY, AS WE
more robust and lead to greater overall uptime and DISCUSS IN THE NEXT
availability for the ecommerce site.
TWO CHAPTERS, WITH A
Agility and efficient design MICROSERVICES APPROACH
Being independent, individual services can be YOU CAN ALSO TAILOR YOUR
developed and deployed in isolation, providing a
significant reduction in “time to market”.
SERVICE TO LOCAL NEEDS. IT
BECOMES EASY TO DEPLOY
This independence also makes each service
A DIFFERENT PAYMENTS
replaceable, bringing the freedom to “plug-and-
play” with a mixture of custom-built and off-the shelf SERVICE OR INTEGRATE WITH
services. A NATIONALLY-FAVOURED
In a commercial environment, this means a firm can COURIER TO MEET THE
deploy its resources to develop in areas where it is EXPECTATIONS OF A DISTINCT
expert, and buy services in areas where others are
experts. You might design your shopping cart service,
REGION.
because this is an area of customer experience
Using the cloud greatly simplifies global deployments
where you want to differentiate and excel, but you
of software and, with the right design, even if your
might opt to purchase a carrier management or
service became unavailable in a whole continent,
warehouse management system and simply plug it
your business continues to operate elsewhere.
into your architecture.
6Why does ecommerce fail at scale?
Cloud-first for scalability, availability
and agility
In contrast to the traditional thinking of monolithic, WHAT ARE
server-first architecture, a microservices, cloud-first
design offers granular, cost-effective scalability,
MICROSERVICES?
higher availability and much lower barriers to
innovation. Microservice architecture is an approach
to software design that breaks down large
At Amido, we see many ecommerce firms now projects into a set of manageable, independent
adopting this approach, isolating individual areas of and loosely-coupled services. Each
functionality from the monolith one at a time and microservice manages a part of the overall
creating new service boundaries. ecommerce process and is reusable across
different clients such as browser or mobile-
Cloud-first thinking gives ecommerce firms the ability based applications. Individual microservices
to cost-effectively scale – up or down – at a service- can range in size and scope from a small,
geography level, well beyond the limits of traditional, closely defined and discrete business task, to
monolithic, server-first architecture. a whole area of operation such as Delivery or
Discounts.
“When delivering transactional systems
A microservice architecture offers significant
at hyperscale, understanding your advantages over traditional, monolithic
enterprise’s target service architecture applications. Each service can be designed,
is only half the battle; the war is won by developed, tested, deployed, managed and
knowing how to break apart your existing maintained independently of the others. It is
monolithic systems and phase in your new an approach that can dramatically reduce the
services in while keeping the lights on in time to get new features into the market. The
result, if designed well, is a more scalable,
the meantime. Like any large scale re-
resilient and flexible solution that lowers the
platforming initiative, life gets materially barrier to innovation by removing any long-
more complicated before the benefits are term commitment to a particular technology
fully realised. Amido are committed to stack.
helping our clients on this complicated
journey.” A microservices approach allows you to build
the services you are expert in and rent or
Simon Evans, CTO, Amido buy services where you are not. This lets you
focus on your unique areas of competitive
advantage, helping you stand out from
competitors.
7Flexibility for the future
Flexibility for the future
The ability to scale seamlessly, up or down, is
not enough for success in today’s ecommerce
environment.
Retail ecommerce continues to grow in size
and importance. As a share of total retail sales,
ecommerce is forecast to rise from 8.7% of global
retail sales in 2016 to 14.6% by 2020.10 In the UK,
2016 8.7%
one of the world’s most mature ecommerce markets,
27% of retail sales now happen online.11
But, the pace of change is accelerating too with
more confident, more savvy, online consumers
demanding more features and better service.
The growth of omni-channel and trends like
showrooming (checking competitors’ prices and
availability online while standing in your store)
means that ecommerce is even more important than
the visible, online revenue it generates. Sixty-eight
per cent of millennials expect an integrated and
seamless experience regardless of channel. That’s
not just between PC and smartphone, but between
online and in-store, too.12
In such a fast-moving environment, it is critical for
retailers to be flexible and responsive to change,
whether that change comes from customer demand
or from the firm’s desire to seize unexpected
2020 14.6%
opportunity.
8Flexibility for the future
Traditional ecommerce solutions are
constrained
Agility is vital in today’s ecommerce environment.
Companies want to develop and deliver new “THE TECHNICAL CONSTRAINTS
capabilities as quickly as possible, focusing their time
and money on the problem at hand. This requires THAT TRADITIONAL E-COMMERCE
a responsive and flexible platform that allows for VENDORS PLACE ON RETAILERS
targeted development. ULTIMATELY IMPACTS THEIR
ABILITY TO PROVIDE AN
To meet market demand and stay ahead of
the competition, you want to avoid the added ENGAGING AND COMPETITIVE
complexity, cost and time required to apply changes CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AT
to a monolithic application. GLOBAL SCALE. RETAILERS
Yet, many large retailers find they have no choice. NEED MORE CONTROL OF
Traditional, enterprise-grade ecommerce platforms THEIR DIGITAL CHANNEL THAN
often rely on a code-base written, in the pre-cloud A FINISHED PRODUCT CAN
era, for a single, monolithic installation. Such
POSSIBLY GIVE THEM, NO MATTER
designs often prevent any meaningful flexibility or
customisation and customers find themselves locked HOW DEEP ITS CUSTOMIZATION
into the vendor’s platform. Typical experiences CAPABILITIES ARE. HYPERSCALE
include: SERVICES HOSTED IN THE CLOUD
• The vendor requires that you pay them to design
REMOVE THESE CONSTRAINTS
AT A COST COMPARABLE
the architecture you need;
• The vendor requires that you only work with
TO IMPLEMENTING BOXED
PRODUCTS. FURTHERMORE, THE
nominated implementation partners;
• The software only works effectively with other
USE OF PLATFORM AS A SERVICE
software from the same vendor. There is CLOUDS KEEPS THE COMPLEXITY
extremely limited interoperability. OF SUPPORT DOWN TO A
MINIMUM.”
There are no minor tweaks for such an architecture.
Even small changes can require an update to the
entire code-base and the associated downtime of a
complete redeployment. SIMON EVANS, CTO, AMIDO
If every lost minute costs thousands of pounds in
sales, that’s a serious disincentive to change.
9Flexibility for the future
Flexibility for customer delight
Mobile commerce is huge. Nearly half of the UK’s ACCORDING TO GOOGLE, 40%
online retail sales come via a mobile device13 and top
OF CONSUMERS WILL LEAVE A
retailers like Argos and Tesco now get more traffic
from mobiles than from desktops or laptops.14 SITE THAT TAKES LONGER THAN
THREE SECONDS TO LOAD, BUT
Today, mobile-first is the watchword for ecommerce
design yet retailers initially struggled to deliver THE AVERAGE LOAD-TIME FOR A
mobile-ready websites. Even now, many sites would RETAIL MOBILE SITE IS STILL 6.9
be better described as “mobile-compatible” than
mobile-first. SECONDS.15
RETAILERS HAVE STRUGGLED
TO MEET CONSUMER DEMAND
FOR AN EFFECTIVE MOBILE
EXPERIENCE. HOW WILL
THEY COPE WITH WHATEVER
INNOVATION NEXT CAPTURES
CONSUMERS’ ATTENTION?
10Possible candidates include the following:
REAL-TIME CONVERSATIONAL
CUSTOMISATION COMMERCE
A phrase coined by Uber’s Chris Messina,
ONE OF TEN ECOMMERCE conversational commerce uses chat, messaging
TRENDS FOR 2017 AS and other natural language technologies to enable
PREDICTED BY ABSOLUNET,16 interaction between consumers and brands.17 The
brand-side interaction can be driven either by human
REAL-TIME CUSTOMISATION users or bots. As Messina foresees:
WILL BUILD ON THE
“The net result is that you and I will be
PERSONALISATION ALREADY
talking to brands and companies over
SEEN ON SOME SITES TO Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram,
DELIVER INSIGHTFUL, Slack, and elsewhere before year’s end,
INTUITIVE, REAL-TIME and will find it normal.”18
RECOMMENDATIONS. An estimated 1.4 billion consumers used mobile
phone messaging apps last year,19 but the concept
In real-time customisation, every visit to your retail reaches even wider than that with the emergence of
site will be different, each deeply personalised and intelligent assistants like Cortana and Siri.
informed by previous visits and other, contextual
personal data. Intelligent home devices like Amazon Echo are
taking the concept further still. Amazon recently
Achieving this in a way that is neither intrusive nor partnered with Capital One to enable customers to
irrelevant will require the ability to connect disparate check their bank balances and make payments using
data sources from both sides of the corporate their voice.20
firewall.
According to Absolunet, users of live chat spend an
How easily can your ecommerce platform integrate average of 5% - 30% more and the buyer conversion
customer insight from other departmental siloes or rate is five to ten times higher following a chat
from external sources like social media? session.21
How easy would it be to integrate either human-to-
human messaging or intelligent chat-bots into your
existing ecommerce infrastructure?
11PROGRAMMATIC OTHER ADVANCES
COMMERCE
• AR and VR – a number of retailers are
Here, regular, everyday products are ordered either experimenting with augmented and virtual reality
automatically, or by a simple, low-involvement technologies such as the Microsoft HoloLens to
technology. To be effective, the technology has to be demonstrate their products in context24
simpler (or more appealing) than writing the item • Touch – Fashion retailer Farfetch recently
onto the bottom of your shopping list. With Amazon launched a touchable video ad – touch any
Echo, you can ask the device to add toothpaste to products you like in the video and they are
your shopping list. The Amazon Dash button22 is waiting in a basket for you at the end.25
a low-cost, product-branded device that you stick
around the home. For example, stick an Aerial
• Geolocation – many retailers are exploring the
possibilities that come with knowing a customer is
washing powder button on your washing machine.
near (or in) your store.
When you find you’re running low on detergent,
simply press the button and it’s added to your
shopping list.
Waitrose’s pilot of the HiKu device23 combines the
options of voice-ordering or bar-code scanning.
Such devices bring us a step closer to the mythical,
milk-ordering fridge, but again, how will your current
platform interoperate with these services?
360
12Flexibility for the future
Flexibility for international expansion Local sales tax
Retailers expanding internationally sometimes
Ecommerce is international. Shoppers can reach find their existing platform simply can’t handle the
your .co.uk site from anywhere in the world. If you requirements for local sales tax. Whereas VAT has a
wish, you can register a “local” domain name, like similar form all across the EU (albeit with different
.com.au, and run it from your UK data centre. rates for different goods), sales tax in the US varies
in structure and rate at a state and even at a county
But, performance quickly becomes a problem. If level.
every web request pings around the world, the user
experience soon slows to an unacceptable level. The Integrating with local solutions, such as point-of-sale
problem is exacerbated for more complex designs, for physical stores, or accommodating international
for example, if your site is hosted in London, but requirements within a monolithic, but national,
translation is outsourced to a service in the US. design can be expensive problems.
This latency might be invisible if you ping your site Locally preferred payment methods
from Stratford, but intolerable for a shopper in
Sydney. Britain is at ease using credit cards for online
payments. Germany is not. The payments market
Retailers with a serious strategy for international in Germany is dominated by bank transfers. In
expansion soon find they need to replicate their site other markets, cash on delivery is preferred (half of
more locally, perhaps in regional data centres for the Amazon’s customers in India pay cash-on-delivery26,
US, APAC etc. 80% of online sales in Russia are CoD27). Elsewhere,
even across Europe’s single market, there are
nationally preferred cards and payment methods.
Beyond simple technology issues of performance,
international ecommerce also requires localisation.
Would every new market require an expensive
But language translation and local currency pricing
update to your payments engine?
is only the beginning.
Russia
Cash on demand
Britain
Locally preferred
Credit cards
payment methods
Germany
Bank transfers
Europe
Nationally preferred cards India
and payment systems Cash on delivery
13Flexibility for the future
Deliveries and logistics
Different countries favour different delivery methods. “The software stack that had taken us
Sometimes, it’s as simple as using the local, market- from the first day of trading was no longer
leading courier. Other times, you need to facilitate the thing that was going to take us to
cash-on-delivery (as above) or navigate opaque the next stage of ASOS’ growth. It was a
address conventions. Expectations of acceptable decent platform, but it was increasingly
delivery times vary locally, too.
hard to innovate. It was increasingly hard
to introduce new capabilities. So, we took
To delight local customers in a targeted market,
sellers prefer to plug in locally relevant delivery the decision across ASOS to start again.”28
services to their ecommerce infrastructure.
The solution for many firms like ASOS has been to
Again, how easy would it be to integrate local move to a cloud-first, microservices approach.
logistics with your existing ecommerce solution?
This can be done in a low-risk, incremental way.
Firms have prioritised the services that give them
Agility for the unforeseen greatest concern and built additional, replacement
services around the monolithic core of their existing
platform. In this way, they can replace inflexible
Retailers locked into a monolithic software package
services one by one, reducing the risk of a wholesale
often find their ability to adapt to international or
replacement and design their own ecommerce
emergent requirements is restricted.
solution, in the cloud, on their terms.
It can be hard to provide consistent performance
Cloud-first thinking gives ecommerce firms the
around the world when you operate from a single,
flexibility to delight customers with great services
core database. It can be prohibitively expensive to
and consistent performance, wherever they are. It
adjust your offering to local needs, especially where
delivers agility beyond the capabilities of traditional,
required downtime can cost tens of thousands in lost
monolithic, server-first architecture while also
revenue.
reducing the risk of change.
And, it can be impossible to innovate to meet
customers’ expectations. ASOS CTO Bob Strudwick
described this situation in a recent Microsoft
TechDays Online video:
14Flexibility for the future
Customer Experience – the last differentiation
The growth of ecommerce represents a fundamental
change in consumer behaviour.
Step back even a decade and success in retail was
all about product range, quality, price and service.
Ecommerce turned that on its head. E-tailers could
offer a product range impossible for a High Street
store to match (even if the online inventory was
backed off by third party fulfilment deals). An off-
High-Street cost base enabled lower gross margins
and with scale came economies that enabled even
more aggressive pricing.
For a small group of first movers, early success
brought the opportunity to invest heavily in the
supply chain and in (often automated) customer
service.
The result is that – even as ecommerce has become
a vital channel for every retailer, whatever your
product range or positioning – success has grown
ever harder to achieve.
In ecommerce today:
• Resilience at scale is a fundamental price of entry
– you simply cannot afford to fail at periods of
peak demand,
• Flexibility of platform is a vital strategic
requirement, but …
• Differentiation is the decider.
15Customer Experience - the last differentiation
DIFFERENTIATION OF THE ONLINE
EXPERIENCE
Why do customers buy from you instead of the Even as they promote their move to the cloud,
similar store along the street or just a click away? often these packages still operate on a monolithic,
Often, the answer is the customer experience. In pre-cloud architecture that makes any degree
traditional, physical stores that was the sum of of customisation difficult, expensive and time-
various factors: a pleasing environment, friendly, consuming to achieve. Any sort of differentiation can
knowledgeable staff, a “fair” package of pricing and be impossible to achieve without re-writing, and then
service, credibility and trust. redeploying, the entire code-base.
One of the biggest challenges facing High Street Effectively, many ecommerce businesses find
leaders is replicating that experience – their “brand themselves locked into a platform that prevents them
promise” – in an online environment. The fact is from offering the customer differentiation that is vital
that, beneath a thin skin of brand image, many for success.
ecommerce offerings are indistinguishable.
The problem is compounded by historic, “Me Too”,
For many large retailers, this is at least partly follow-the-leader, thinking. As they used to say, “no-
due to the restrictions created by their choice of one got fired for buying IBM.”
ecommerce platform. There is a relatively small pool
of enterprise-class ecommerce vendors each offering But, buying the same constrains you to only ever
a very similar set of constrained functionality. They being the same. It’s an acknowledgement that the
offer nothing new to help retailers differentiate their best you can achieve is to mimic the best.
offering and attract shoppers to their store rather
than a competitor’s. Ultimately, a strategy of follow-the-leader represents
a failure of ambition.
Worse, these platforms effectively prohibit any
meaningful customisation of the customer We see many leading retailers now asking, “If
experience. Retailers frequently find that any ecommerce is a core part of our business, why
promised flexibility simply doesn’t exist. The out-of- are we locking ourselves into a platform of
the-box experience is disappointingly vanilla and, compromise?”
if the retailer attempts any customisation they find
themselves locked into an ongoing cycle of expensive If ecommerce is at the core of your business, you
upgrades: whenever the underlying solution is need to own that, on your own terms.
updated, they must pay the vendor to reapply their
customisations in order to work with each new
version. As one retailer stated, “It’s complete vendor
lock-in. Once you’ve spent £10 million, you’re not
going to write it off. You just keep spending because
you have to make it work.”Customer Experience - the last differentiation
OWNING YOUR ADVANTAGE
Increasingly, we see leading ecommerce players requiring the downtime associated with a complete
breaking free from vendor lock-in and seeking a redeployment, but ASOS is free to select the best-
better solution. One of these is ASOS, the UK’s of-breed solution for every service. The firm can
largest independent online fashion and beauty rent, buy or build from scratch the best solutions to
retailer. create a unique customer experience. The breadth
of services available in today’s SaaS market allows
Having recognised that its existing platform was for a true hybrid solution of custom built and rented
limiting the firm’s ability to innovate, ASOS took the software.
decision to start again. CTO Bob Strudwick describes
his design goals as the team built its new solution: ASOS’ decision to deploy on Azure complements
the microservices approach. The firm divided its IT
“We made two big decisions. The first infrastructure between Commodity and Competitive
was to create a microservice based Advantage. Azure’s PaaS service provides the
commodity functions that are essential to running an
architecture. And the second was that
ecommerce platform. As Bob Strudwick describes:
we would target Azure as the hosting
environment.”29
“[It] gives us the potential for our software
engineering capability to be directed at
Those two decisions were critical for ASOS to
differentiate its customer experience. those things which bring competitive
advantage rather than the commodity
A microservices approach, where each piece of functions of maintenance, backups etc.”30
the ecommerce offering (e.g. the shopping basket,
the delivery module, payments etc.) is designed, Forward-thinking firms are dividing their
built and deployed as a separate and independent infrastructure between commodity and differentiator.
service, gives unparalleled agility. They buy commodity off the shelf, at the best
possible price, but they build their differentiation,
As Strudwick explains, “We wanted independently keeping close control of their strategic advantage.
enhanceable services. We wanted to be able to
innovate rapidly across those services.” Cloud-first thinking gives retailers the ability to
differentiate their customer offering in ways that are
Not only can each service now be upgraded or impossible with traditional, monolithic, server-first
altered without affecting the rest of the platform or solutions.Customer Experience - the last differentiation
Beyond retail
The challenges of an effective ecommerce platform Financial services
are not unique to retailers. They affect any business
Retail brokers and others experience trading spikes
with extreme peaks in transaction volumes,
around popular flotations (e.g. Royal Mail in 2013)
that requires the flexibility to adapt to changing
or market-moving events, such as 2016’s Brexit vote.
circumstances and that faces competition from
similar service providers.
The day after the Brexit referendum (24th June)
saw trading volumes ten times higher than normal.
Bookmakers
Some major trading sites like those of TD Ameritrade
Unsurprisingly, betting firms face huge spikes in and Fidelity Investments crashed34 while others, like
demand around big sporting events like the Grand Hargreaves Lansdown, warned users of problems in
National, FA Cup final or Wimbledon. reporting prices for certain stocks.35
For the 2016 Grand National, betting firm William Frustrated investors vented their anger on Twitter and
Hill expected £200 million to be wagered on the other social media sites.
“biggest horse race in history”.31
Coinciding with other big events like the Masters,
Champions League and Premier League football, the
industry enjoyed the biggest weekend of betting ever
seen.
William Hill was set to process 25,000 betting
transaction per minute at peak times, which they
estimated to be “more than six times as many
transactions as Amazon UK on Black Friday.”32
A critical moment crash can be expensive, costing
£30,000 per minute in lost revenue by one
estimate,33 but poor performance is also a major
issue. Especially for time-sensitive events like horse
races, slow site response times are enough to drive
punters to competitors’ sites.
18Beyond retail
Charities
Big giving events can pose problems for charities,
too. Comic Relief and the like are fantastic for
focusing attention and generating donations, but can
disappoint if the infrastructure can’t cope with the
demand that is generated.
Last year, the US event Big Give SA was a victim
of its own success when it suffered a web crash at
9.30 am on its one targeted day of giving.36 Similar
problems have been experienced in the past by the
UK’s Big Give organisation37 and by JustGiving.38
In many ways, this demand pattern of occasional but
very steep spikes is ideally suited to cloud-first design.
While a monolithic architecture would require
charities to invest in hardware always capable of
meeting occasional demand, a cloud-first approach
enables the organisation to simply turn on additional
server-instances as required. After the event, the
additional resources can be just as easily scaled back
ensuring that the cost of computing always matches
the level of donation activity.
19The Amido approach
The Amido approach
Amido is an independent technical consultancy that Founded in 2010, we work with brands such as
specialises in implementing cloud-first solutions. ASOS, Atkins Global, Channel 4, JLT, Wellcome Trust
We help our clients build resilience at scale, flexibility and CBRE, utilising technology to get you closer to
for the future and differentiation of customer your customer.
experience. And, we do this while minimising
business-risk and build-cost. “BY DESIGNING AND IMPLEMENTING A
SOLUTION WITH NO VENDOR LOCK-IN,
We specialise in assembling and integrating proven
WHICH COULD INTEGRATE WITH OUR
cloud technologies, often building solutions around
LEGACY SYSTEMS AND SCALE GLOBALLY,
an existing core while enabling clients to prioritise
their investment between commodity services and AMIDO DELIVERED SIGNIFICANT
those that deliver competitive advantage. We design BUSINESS BENEFIT WHILST CONSISTENTLY
solutions that bridge and augment clients’ existing DELIVERING ON TIME AND ON BUDGET.”
technology, reducing the operational risk of change. BOB STRUDWICK, CTO, ASOS PLC
Vendor-neutral, we combine our deep understanding
of the market with your knowledge of your business
to select the best strategic mix of technology to give
your company a competitive edge. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW
WE CAN HELP BUILD SUCCESS
We take a pragmatic approach. We won’t charge BEYOND SCALE, PLEASE VISIT OUR
you to re-invent the wheel, but believe in consuming
WEBSITE WHERE YOU’LL FIND MORE
proven cloud services where possible rather than
INFORMATION ABOUT WHAT WE DO
building anew. We combine the best that is available
and then build around the edge. Our strength lies in AND WHO WE’VE DONE IT FOR.
knowing what is available and how to deploy that in
the most effective way.
Security Operations Hosting
Microservices Access Control - OAuth2 APM Compute Options
Design Network Control Alerting Economics
Rate Limiting Diagnostics Deployment Model
Facets
Anti Tamper SLAs Configuration Mgmt
Transort Dashboards Service Versioning
Engineering Transactions Scale Out High Availability Batch Disaster Events Low Latency
Continuous Idempotancy Sharding and Active-Active ELT Recovery Competing CDN
Delivery Storage GeoDR Consumers
ACID Traffic Management Feeds Second
Stubs/ Design Auto/Scheduled Streaming Level
by Contract BASE Scaling Routing Caching
AMQP
Multi Cloud
20Conclusion
Conclusion
The retail calendar is full of spikes. While Black China for Singles Day; then re-deploy to the US for
Friday makes the news, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving.
Hallowe’en, Singles Day, Golden Week and more all
drive peaks in demand. Cloud-first gives the flexibility to deliver market-
specific solutions where required. No one-size-fits-
However, the limitations of leading, enterprise-grade, all. If your Middle-East markets need a different
ecommerce solutions mean that simply surviving payments module to handle cash on delivery, that’s
the peaks has engulfed IT strategy. In the main, simple. If conversational commerce becomes the
these solutions remain grounded in a monolithic next big thing, you can respond with agility … and
architecture designed for a pre-cloud age of on- limited downtime.
premise server farms.
Critically, cloud-first enables differentiation of the
As technology (on both the consumer and retailer customer experience. When all other ecommerce
sides) increasingly drives the pace of change in retail, sites look the same, and when you can no longer
a few, leading ecommerce firms are realising that compete purely on price or logistics, it is vital that
success requires three elements, of which Scale is you own the customer experience, on your own
merely the price of entry. These are: terms.
• Resilience at scale
• Flexibility for the future
• Differentiation of experience
AMIDO HAS A SUCCESSFUL TRACK
To achieve this, they are moving away from RECORD OF HELPING SOME OF THE
traditional, monolithic architecture and embracing UK’S LARGEST ECOMMERCE FIRMS
cloud-first designs.
DEVELOP CLOUD-FIRST SOLUTIONS.
Thinking cloud-first, rather than server-first, enables
modular design in which each service can be GET IN TOUCH IF YOU ARE INTERESTED
designed, deployed and scaled independently. The IN FINDING OUT MORE ABOUT AN
answer to greater capacity and higher availability is APPROACH THAT DELIVERS THE SCALE,
no longer to continually scale up, but rather to scale FLEXIBILITY AND DIFFERENTIATION
out with more, smaller servers deployed where they THAT YOU DESIRE WHILE MINIMISING
are required. It delivers an agility that is impossible
YOUR OPERATIONAL AND BUSINESS
under a monolithic design.
RISK.
Cloud-first enables individual services to be scaled
as required. For example, deploy additional server-
instances to support your shopping-basket service inENDNOTES
1. Tibus.com (2016) Which websites crashed on black Friday 21. Absolunet (2016)
2016? Available at: https://www.tibus.com/blog/which-websites- 22. BBC.co.uk, Cellan-Jones, R. (2016) Amazon dash - who wants to
crashed-on-black-friday-2016/ live in a push-button world? Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/
2. CNBC, Bowden, M., Images, G., Source, Mlyn, S. and Gustafson, news/technology-37224691
K. (2016) Cyber Monday: Why retailers can’t keep their sites from 23. Internet of Business, Drinkwater, D. (2016) Waitrose:
crashing. Available at: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/30/cyber- Customer choice is key to IoT innovation. Available at: https://
monday-why-retailers-cant-keep-their-sites-from-crashing.html internetofbusiness.com/waitrose-customer-choice-is-key-to-iot-
3. Accenture (2016) Who are the Millennial shoppers? And what do innovation/
they really want? Available at: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/ 24. PYMNTS (2016) Lowe’s and Microsoft put the HoloLens to
insight-outlook-who-are-millennial-shoppers-what-do-they-really- work. Available at: http://www.pymnts.com/news/merchant-
want-retail innovation/2016/lowes-customers-renovate-with-microsofts-
4. Accenture (2016) hololens/
5. Accenture (2016) 25. See https://www.farfetch.com/uk/editorial/the-nutcracker.aspx
6. Tibus.com (2016) Which websites crashed on black Friday 26. Fortune.com, Walt, V. (2015) Amazon invades India. Available at:
2016? Available at: https://www.tibus.com/blog/which-websites- http://fortune.com/amazon-india-jeff-bezos/
crashed-on-black-friday-2016/ 27. Ecommerce News Europe (2016) Ecommerce in Russia. Available
7. Tibus.com (2016) at: https://ecommercenews.eu/ecommerce-per-country/ecommerce-
8. The Register (2016) Black Friday: Cashback site Quidco goes russia/
TITSUP* on payday. Available at: http://www.theregister. 28. See https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechDaysOnline/UK-
co.uk/2016/11/25/cashback_site_quidco_goes_titsup_on_payday/ TechDays-Online--Future-Decoded/Evolving-ASOS-to-Azure-
9. Tamebay (2016) Royal Mail report problems with online tracking on Microservices
Black Friday weekend. Available at: http://tamebay.com/2016/11/ 29. See https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechDaysOnline/UK-
royal-mail-report-problems-with-online-tracking-on-black-friday- TechDays-Online--Future-Decoded/Evolving-ASOS-to-Azure-
weekend.html Microservices
10. eMarketer Inc. (2016) Worldwide retail Ecommerce sales will reach 30. See https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechDaysOnline/UK-
$1.915 Trillion this year. Available at: https://www.emarketer.com/ TechDays-Online--Future-Decoded/Evolving-ASOS-to-Azure-
Article/Worldwide-Retail-Ecommerce-Sales-Will-Reach-1915-Trillion- Microservices
This-Year/1014369 31. William Hill plc (216) Grand national: Biggest ever betting
11. InternetRetailing.net, Rigby, C. (2016) UK online spending rises bonanza! Available at: https://www.williamhillplc.com/newsmedia/
by 11% to £114bn in 2015, and by 12% to £24bn over Christmas: newsroom/media-releases/2016/grand-national-biggest-ever-
IMRG. Available at: http://internetretailing.net/2016/01/uk-online- betting-bonanza/
spending-11pc-up-at-114bn-in-2015-and-12pc-up-at-24bn-over- 32. William Hill plc (2016)
christmas/ 33. Quilton, D. (2016) Betting websites slow during Europa league
12. Accenture (2016) quarter finals. Available at: https://capacitas.co.uk/betting-websites-
13. IMRG (2016) IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index. Available at: slow-europa-league-quarter-finals/
http://www.imrg.org/index.php?catalog=2591. 34. Reuters (2016) Investors left fuming as some financial Websites
14. Ofcom (2016) The communications market report 2016. Available crash after Brexit. Available at: http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/
at: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/cmr/cmr16. During tech-news/investors-left-fuming-some-financial-websites-crash-after-
the survey month of March 2015, see The communications market brexit-n598521
report, page 368 for details. 35. Connington, J. (2016) Brexit: Investors struggle to buy as trading
15. Thinkwithgoogle.com (2016) Why marketers should care about volumes hit 10 times normal levels. Available at: http://www.
mobile page speed. Available at: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/ telegraph.co.uk/investing/news/brexit-investors-struggling-to-buy-as-
articles/mobile-page-speed-load-time.html trading-volumes-hit-10-tim/
16. Absolunet (2016) See: http://10ecommercetrends.com/ 36. Taylor, R. and Serna, S. (2016) Big give SA to accept donations
17. Chatbots Magazine, Quoc, M. (2016) 11 examples of Wednesday in response to website failure. Available at: http://www.
conversational commerce and Chatbots in 2016. Available at: ksat.com/news/big-give-sa-press-conference-on-technical-difficulties
https://chatbotsmagazine.com/11-examples-of-conversational- 37. Third Sector (2011) High demand forces temporary suspension
commerce-57bb8783d332#.ane4gt7v5 of big give Christmas scheme. Available at: http://www.thirdsector.
18. Chatbots Magazine, Quoc, M. (2016) co.uk/high-demand-forces-temporary-suspension-big-give-
19. eMarketer Inc. (2015) Mobile messaging to reach 1.4 Billion christmas-scheme/communications/article/1107655
worldwide in 2015. Available at: https://www.emarketer.com/Article/ 38. BBC (2013) JustGiving fund-raising site crashes. Available at: http://
Mobile-Messaging-Reach-14-Billion-Worldwide-2015/1013215 www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21798834
20. Shopify Business Encyclopedia (2016) Conversational commerce
definition - what is conversational commerce. Available at: https://
www.shopify.com/encyclopedia/conversational-commerce
22Amido is a technical consultancy specialising
in assembling and integrating proven cloud
technologies.
We work with brands like ASOS, Atkins Global, CBRE,
Global Radio and Channel 4 to remove friction from
their customer’s online and mobile experience to
drive revenue and engagement.
From social sign-in to smart content delivery and
smooth, scalable transactions, we help brands build
loyalty through customer recognition by bridging
systems in a powerful and unique way, yielding real-
time results for brands and their customers.
Our passion is finding the right strategic mix of
technology to give your company a competitive edge
and your customers the best experience possible.
Follow us @weareamido
www.amido.com
london@amido.com
Level 4 Lafone House
The Leathermarket
11/13 Weston Street
London SE1 3ERYou can also read
