Why move your eCommerce stack to the cloud? Here are 6 top perks

If you’re on a mission to craft digital customer experiences that are fast and flawless across all touchpoints, it’s time to fly higher with cloud-native infrastructure with commercetools. 

It may seem surprising that still today, digital storefronts face slowdowns or crashes during seasonal events like Black Friday or Valentine’s Day. After all, eCommerce volume keeps growing — Google Cloud’s retail customers saw more online traffic in the first six months of 2022 than in 2019 — and the expectation is to expand further into 2023 and beyond. What’s surprising is that so many brands haven’t yet moved their eCommerce stack to the cloud. 

Understandably, letting go of the control afforded by on-premise and even hybrid IT infrastructures is a hard decision; for many companies, micromanaging every aspect of their data centers and servers has become synonymous with security, data protection and even platform reliability. But is it, really? 

When calculating the cost of keeping tight control over IT infrastructure, does it pay off? Does an on-prem IT help your company deliver seamless and engaging customer experiences? 

Here, let’s delve deeper into the top five perks leading brands and retailers like Ulta Beauty, Danone, BMW Group and Moonpig have benefited since leaping to cloud-native commerce.

You’ve probably seen it countless times: Whenever website traffic reaches a peak, performance slows down, or worse, it crashes completely. Shoppers land on 404 error pages or cannot even access the website when the connection is too slow. If that happens, consumers are unlikely to return, and you’re missing out on revenue. If your company’s IT is on-prem, increasing online capacity to handle those traffic peaks requires planning months in advance and additional hosting fees to cover spikes.

Cloud-native infrastructure has the answer to this problem: Auto-scaling. Instead of manually provisioning capacity, you can meet your online traffic demands, even when workloads are unpredictable or constantly changing, so your websites don’t experience downtime or delays. With more elastic computing resources and power than a traditional hosted solution, brands can break free from conventional on-premise software lock-in and server maintenance. 

If security and data protection are big concerns when considering the cloud, you can rest easy! Pivoting to the cloud means instant compliance with the latest global, regional and local regulations, such as GDPR compliance.  

For instance, commercetools has been built as a truly multi-tenant platform that runs in certified data centers in Europe, the US and APAC, and is hosted on Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS), guaranteeing the implementation of measures according to the red security level. Both cloud service providers — as well as commercetools — have been certified by ISO/IEC 27001, ISO 9001 and SOC II.  

Importantly, the cloud traffic is protected by pre-configured WAF rules from our cloud service providers and the traffic to commercetools is encrypted by state-of-the-art ciphers only. Plus, all communications are only available via HTTPS and are secured by TLS 1.2. In addition, we utilize geographically separate environments to ensure protection from data loss and a 99.99% uptime of our systems. All of these ironclad measures ensure maximum security and data protection across our network, platform and operations. 

Behind the scenes, cloud computing providers such as Google Cloud and AWS provide extensive availability zones and a distributed infrastructure that enables you to get maximum availability and uptime without effort. Also, a high-bandwidth and low-latency network that spans the globe means instant backups when facing issues or even uncontrollable events like earthquakes and power outages in specific zones or regions.

Instead of managing the nuts and bolts of IT, cloud infrastructure gives you flexibility wins from the get-go. That’s because your team isn’t focused on maintaining servers or fixing bugs, and they can switch to what actually matters: Innovation.

In an on-prem environment, innovation isn’t easy; hassle-free experimentation and deployment are challenging as tech teams are too focused on preventing the next IT crash. The result is that your infrastructure lags and accumulates technical debt over time. 
With a cloud-based, API-first infrastructure, your team can switch from disaster recovery mode to building the features that make your company unique in the eyes of your customers.

There are many ways the cloud helps companies reduce TCO. Cloud computing is like utility metering, similar to electricity or water, so your business pays only per use. This shifts expenses from capital to operational expenditures while reducing IT spend, as you can scrap infrastructure maintenance, hosting and provisioning costs. 

In addition, thanks to multi-tenancy and versionless infrastructure, hardware and software are always up-to-date, ensuring you get lower costs via economies of scale, as well as ditching expensive yearly licensing fees and integration costs.

At the end of the day, pivoting to cloud-native infrastructure is about maximizing your conversion rates and return on investment (ROI). For instance, Moonpig, a personalized greeting cards business, has increased cross-selling by 40% since switching to cloud-native commerce.

This can be achieved because, ultimately, customers can engage with seamless experiences across touchpoints, especially in storefront performance and speed, and exciting features are shipped constantly to keep them hooked. The result? A growth in sales, an expansion in margins and optimization of your ROI are down the line when moving your eCommerce to the cloud.

Cloud-native infrastructure is an integral part of our commitment to MACH-based architecture (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless), which is a combination of technologies that ensure commerce infrastructure can capitalize on maximum elasticity, flexibility, scalability, agility and security. 

With MACH, you benefit from a composable approach in which every component is pluggable, scalable, replaceable and can be continuously improved through agile development to meet evolving business requirements, so you can manage ever-evolving customer demands, spontaneous sales surges, market fluctuations and even uncontrollable events across the globe without missing out on reliability or security. 

Move your eCommerce tech stack to the cloud with commercetools and the cloud provider of your choice. Get in touch with us to get started.