AWS for retail companies

Retail clients are always a challenge, the dynamics of which requires modern solutions and high-quality execution. The main requirements for the infrastructure of the client of the Retail sector are currently:  

• 24/7 continuous service of a large number of clients 
• Recording of a wide range of goods and services 

• Ensuring operation in periodic extreme load modes 
• Supporting of several communication channels with clients 
• Customer loyalty system support, personalization 
• Ensuring the secure storage of customers’ personal data 
• Scalability, enabling rapid entry into new markets 

Using Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions allows you to build an internal inventory management system, optimize logistics, speed up workflows when implementing Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to host a company database. Amazon RDS is used to process all the web content and transaction details which improves performance and reliability, reduces capital costs and time-to-market for new services compared to traditional solutions. 

A company can use Amazon RDS to process queries and orders quickly and reliably, both traditionally and during peak periods. 

Moving the entire infrastructure to AWS allows the company to take advantages of globalization’s benefits. A company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) across multiple availability zones (Multi-AZ) to provide a reliable, always-on service to its customers with no matter how much traffic their sites receive. A company uses Amazon EC2 for staging and production for its websites and applications such as back office order management, order tracking and shipping. 

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) can be used to implement a company’s email services. Amazon SES is used to manage error handling, alert staff about back office tasks and inform customers about the status of their orders. 

Amazon Route 53 and AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) services can be used by a company for multi-factor authentication to protect their data. 

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is used to store files securely and reliably. Company files are hosted in multiple availability zones to ensure their safety. 

Amazon CloudFront is used as the global content delivery network (CDN) which uses Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to automate scaling. 

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is used to reduce development time and speed time-to-market for new products. AWS Fargate is used to automate the management of virtual servers. With AWS Fargate a company can support continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline and reduce overall software development time. 

Using AWS services enables customer-focused companies to streamline processes and focus on global expansion, new product launches and new features creation. 

Consumers today have a lot of buying opportunities – they can shop through multiple channels such as hypermarkets, e-commerce, convenience stores and supermarkets. 

➡ An example can be one of the largest retailers in the field of perfumes and cosmetics in Ukraine. It uses Amazon Personalize to offer personalized recommendations to repeat shoppers to increase engagement and new product purchases, and ultimately build customer loyalty even further. Amazon Personalize allows the shop to recommend popular or similar products based on customers’ previous purchases. 

Since the implementation of Amazon Personalize to deliver personalized product recommendation emails, a third of transactions based on these newsletters contain at least one of the recommended products. Overall a significant increase in product purchases was achieved compared to standard customer emails.