Since the beginning of the millennium, consumers have shifted to buying ever-increasing amounts of products and services online. Many companies today even find that their e-commerce sites generate a greater proportion of their revenue than brick and mortar stores. In fact, some have completely abandoned the traditional retail model and only sell products online. Today's CEOs, CMOs, and other business leaders need to consider their online revenue, whatever their industry.
Companies like Amazon and Alibaba already proved it can work, with revenue of $280.5 billion and $38.4 billion respectively for 2019. And though Walmart - one of the top five traders in the US online - is currently losing money with its e-commerce site, this likely will change and become a profitable venture for the retail giant, as its 2019 online growth surged by 41%.
On-Site or Cloud Hosting
Yet with all this online trade, you need to decide how you want to approach data storage and other computing needs, along with whether you want to work from an on-site server or with a cloud interface. Not only does such a decision to affect capital and operating budgets, it determines how easily businesses can respond to market changes.
And this trend is unlikely to change. Market research over the next four years shows continuing increases in businesses moving to the cloud, with over $73 billion projected growth forecast from 2020-2024. This involves multiple industries, including retail, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and logistics.
How to Utilize the Cloud in Logistics
Logistics companies in particular require efficient data storage, and the cloud offers benefits that make it particularly suitable for those in the shipping and receiving industry. These include:
- Better cost structures: Cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) require very little up-front investment, with companies just paying for what they use, which reduces risk and provides quicker returns on investment.
- Full supply chain visibility: Cloud and SaaS solutions connect partners in any supply chain effectively, helping you keep everything under control and, more importantly, your customers happy.
- Making collaboration simple: Supply chains in this digitally-transformed world become increasingly complex, each piece in the chain dependent on the next, and streamlining collaboration between different parts of the chain only bolsters what your company can do. Cloud-based logistics solves the problem of communication silos by allowing every part of the supply chain access to the information it needs, allowing for more harmonious and predictable logistics.
Consider Enkoproducts, a shipping label company. They implemented cloud-based hosting, which allowed them to streamline the delivery process so customers get their packages sooner, processing orders within one business day. They help other e-commerce businesses on the supply chain by providing labels and packaging that helps others businesses ship products. Their cloud-based system helps them deliver faster and better fulfill orders, especially during peak seasons.
Have a Cloud Strategy
If you're looking at how to best utilize cloud-computing for your business, it's vital to have a cloud strategy in place. Wavestone US - an IT consultancy - sees the importance of the cloud and how it's become a utility for any business. Although Wavestone sees in-house IT as imperative for some tasks, it suggests an approach that ultimately customizes cloud-computing to each client, collaborating to achieve the best solution, and providing innovative solutions to create value.
E-commerce websites can especially benefit from the following:
- Enhanced security: If your platform manages valuable information, like customers' payment details, names, and addresses, it's imperative that they're kept safe. Cloud-based platforms ensure security not only for you, but for your customers as well.
- Reduced costs: Many companies offer hosting services, but only at a price. Though it's a recurring cost, it ends up being lower than hosting on-site.
- Reliability: When companies charge you, that means they take responsibility for managing your websites, hosting, and ensuring its future success, which gives you peace of mind to focus on other aspects of the business.
Shifting Markets
It's become easier for businesses to launch effective websites, led by the lowering of capital expenditures and consumers' embrace of online commerce. Today's websites are deployed more quickly, streamlining how quickly products and services go to market. As buying online becomes ever more common, businesses will inevitably have to shift more of their budgets to e-commerce solutions.
If you're planning to expand into a new geographic location or launching a new product or service, cloud-based e-commerce applications give you flexibility at a reasonable price. Evaluating total costs for migrating your data and apps to the cloud need not be an either-or solution. Some IT can and should stay in-house.
Making Businesses More Agile
A big perk of cloud-based hosting involves its scalability, which allows businesses to adjust quickly to spikes in demand. Online retail shops need this ability to adjust to increased traffic during the holiday season or product launches.
When you install simple cloud systems into your branding operations, your business gains flexibility. You can easily upgrade or downgrade capacity, adjusting to promotional events and slow sales periods. This allows operating costs to more closely align with revenue.
Another example of good use of cloud is by using eNote to make your business even more agile. eNote is an electronic version of what has traditionally been a paper document Since it is electronic, it needs to be created, signed, and managed in a specific way to ensure that it has the same legal enforceability as paper.
Creating Consumer Experiences
Smaller-scale organizations also use e-commerce platforms to transform their capabilities for customer relations and providing information, through blogs and other content. In this way, they're creating online experiences for their customers. Bigger businesses can and should learn these same tricks.
With heads of IT departments having a plethora of providers to choose from, it's important to evaluate your cloud provider carefully, as many are industry-specific. As every e-commerce business essentially focuses on creating a retail model that offers functions like segmented product catalogs, repeating orders, and extended payment terms, it's important to ensure your cloud provider is on the same page.
Conclusion
Cloud computing has become the revolution that the Internet was in the 1990s. Though cloud-based storage no longer excites industries as it once did, this shift to ordinary means the cloud will continue to provide storage for business data and support for applications. For any business involved in e-commerce, it's already proved essential across the supply chain.
