In an AWS survey of executives at e-commerce retailers, nearly 6 in 10 said they’re most concerned with how to maximize long-term customer relationships, while 7 in 10 said they’re focused on investing in a stronger performing website.
Not surprisingly, these two insights go hand in hand. A better-performing website will grow loyal customers.
The insights were shared by Ronak Shah, Senior Partner, Solutions Architect, Retail & CPG at AWS, in a webinar alongside Aditya Ghule, Senior Partner, Marketing Manager at Cloudinary, and hosted by myself.
The webinar, “Delivering Immersive Commerce Experiences With Composable Architecture Powered by AWS and Cloudinary,” is available on-demand and dives head-first into the importance of e-tailers building innovative, immersive digital experiences and how a composable architecture is the only way to get them there.
According to Shah, the online experience right now isn’t delivering enough for online shoppers. He said customers lack confidence in buying online, as they return items too often.
He said customers want experiences that merge the physical with the digital. They want immersive, AR, or VR experiences that provide a more dynamic and accurate representation of the product, but retailers lack the abilities to do this in-house. To keep up, retailers need to invest in composable technology that can add a high-performing visual media layer.
Shah explained the first step in creating a more dynamic visual experience online is to migrate from a monolithic architecture to a composable architecture, which gives retailers better speed of delivery, more innovation and the ability to compose your own user experience.
Driving this movement for retailers today is the MACH Alliance, which has emerged as a governing body with a rigorous certification process. Cloudinary became certified and joined the alliance a little over a year ago. AWS joined the alliance in January 2022.
According to Shah, there are some foundations of modern composable applications to consider:
- Be headless. Leverage tools that separate the front-end presentation from the back-end logic to enable more innovation.
- Be future proof. Deploy containerization and serverless computing to lower costs and be faster.
- Be agile. Lean into open sources that help projects become agile in design and development.
- Be purposeful. Decouple databases to increase scalability and reduce failure points.
To help companies fully understand composable architecture, Cloudinary has released this comprehensive guide.
From a MACH foundation and composable architecture, Ghule then discussed the role of Cloudinary’s visual media layer to meet the needs of consumers who seek a more thrilling online experience but won’t wait for pages to load.
Ghule cited a stat from fashion brand GUESS, who saw a decrease in page load times by 40% when switching to Cloudinary, ultimately increasing engagement.
Cloudinary’s automation also helps GUESS adjust image URLs, ensuring that all images are optimized for size, format and proper rendering, regardless of the device or browser. GUESS uploads a single version of each image and uses Cloudinary to automatically scale images based on viewport, browser and other factors without much manual intervention.
Cloudinary’s rich visual media capabilities include video optimization for uninterrupted experiences and are built to make sites run faster.
Brands looking to increase consumer engagement and to keep online shoppers browsing for goods longer can contact Cloudinary to learn more about its rich visual media layer, omnichannel delivery, and composable platform.
