Singles' Day sales: The Battle of Data Traffic! How E-commerce Companies and Retailers Stay Ahead of the Game

Singles’ Day has ballooned quickly to become one of the biggest shopping festivals in Asia. All E-commerce platforms from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are already actively promoting and stocking up their warehouses for the event. This leads us to one question, are their websites truly ready for the exploding data traffic during the festival? E-commerce platforms can potentially damage their customer satisfaction rates and faith towards the suppliers if the websites crash in the checkout process. This might tear up their corporate reputation. The construction of “Modernized IT Architecture” and “Data Digital Transformation” shall be the key to how E-commerce companies and retailers can stay ahead of the game.

The origins of the Singles’ Day Shopping Festival dates back to November 11, 2009. Taobao China from Alibaba invented this promotion: The 11.11 Global Shopping Festival. In the past decade, E-commerce platforms and retailers have hopped on this train, joining this battle. Companies even came up with another extension of the festival known as the “Double 12”. A series of annual shopping festival is no doubt a great challenge to the websites handling massive data traffic, cash flow and data storage.

A Great Challenge to E-commerce Companies and Retailers: Exploding Data Traffic and Technical Debt

Traditional on-perm environments lack flexibility and scalability. The exploding data traffic and server load from the shopping festivals can be seen as a naturally generated super DDoS. The term Technical Debt refers to the “messy coding language” of a system due to budget controls and required speedy development process in the initial launching stage. The incompatibility of new systems and legacy operating environments is also a major issue. This leads to system malfunctions that are often overlooked, creating more needed manpower, time and costs into the maintenance process when the product and service goes online.

According to reports, Alibaba’s Southeast Asian E-commerce Company, Lazada, hit an astounding 20 million visits on its platform on Singles‘ day last year, which was a new record high for the site. The company’s service areas include countries like Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. 

The Hong Kong Television Network Ltd. owned HKTVmall also took part in last year’s Singles’ Day Promotion. The daily order volume increased over 110% compared to average sales numbers and the page views for the site also went up to 1.6 million per day. Thus, the prevention of system overloading and the reduced performance of websites caused by the exploding data traffic is a crucial factor for the E-commerce companies that wish to boost their sales. 

Stragties Matter: Efficeint Ways to Boost Sales During Shopping Festivals

When it comes to solving the exploding data traffic problem, the international E-commerce company, Carousell, provides an interesting case study. Being the largest smartphone and web-based marketplace in Southeast Asia, the company regularly offers Flash Sales adopting the Dynamic Caching feature by Cloudflare. This has helped Carousell tackle the enormous data traffic that was 4 times more than usual.

The company further converted its operation architecture to GCP, processing over 80 million goods on the platform, along with 500 million pictures as well as over 20 billion private messages on the platform since Carousell formed. GCP helped overcome the technical issues with network latency and bandwidth differences, providing consumers around the world a seamless and consistent shopping experience.

A Chance for Corporates to eliminate Techinal Debts: Google Cloud

Cloud storage service not only resolved the difficulties with the infrastructure and cloud computing, but also has an immense contribution in eliminating technical debts. Srinivas Vaddadi, Head of Cloud Transformations and Cloud Migrations at HSBC stated that the introduction of GCP really elevated their agility and gave them a high DevOps mindset regarding the companies internal operations. Furthermore, the Automation features allowed the company to swiftly bounce back from failures and cut back the workload. This factor permits them to focus on innovation instead of working on maintaining their infrastructure.

Take the Rip and replace technique for example, this method enables the software to fully apply the advantages of GCP. The advantages include its horizontal scalability, highly managed services, and high availability. When you start the whole coding process from the beginning, you would be free of the technical debts caused by the older version softwares.

CloudMile Create a Comprehensive Solution for E-commerce Retail

So what did the Retail & E-commerce industry learn from the Singles’ Day Shopping festival? Under the waves of Digital Transformation, personalized service has already become a trend in Marketing strategies. From data traffic to wish lists and shopping carts and eventually down to the payment process, the companies must figure out ways to analyze, decipher and predict consumers’ behavior. They need to create a more considerate and immediate service to gain the customer’s loyalty with the brand.

As the core partner of Cloudflare and Google Cloud, CloudMile constructs and offers an ultimate solution. We are experienced in service integration and very confident with our expertise. We assist businesses with the implementation of Cloudflare to build a fast and secure DNS. Corporates shall enjoy a both reliable and efficient CDN as well as load balancing. Furthermore, to adapt GCP’s incredibly practical architecture to reach the flexibility to expand the resources. This will ensure the server’s stability when facing high data traffic. 

Later in the process, we will introduce database and cloud storage services like the Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage to integrate big data. In addition, BigQuery enables searches for PB level information within seconds and comes with a built-in machine learning technology. With the features above, you will be able to attain the analysis in a shorter time, further helping the optimizations, especially in all stages of customer’s experience and business process. Ultimately guiding your brand to provide the most accurate personalized services. The whole upgrade will certainly create a distinctive advantage for your company among other businesses.