Are you looking for great ways to get more people to visit your website? Have a growing business and want to increase your sales even more? Integrating your website with Amazon can help fulfil these intentions and bring your business to the next level. Amazon can also become a good solution not only for those who intend to expand internationally, but for those website owners who just need a quality hosting provider. Anyway, when entering Amazon, you want your website to work effectively, display correct information and prices, with no downtimes and errors. You want it to be efficient enough to cope with sudden traffic growth. With all these plans in mind, it can be tough for a non-tech savvy person to successfully integrate a website with Amazon. But, everything in its turn. Let's first find out what benefits and services AWS can provide for your business.
Why Should You Choose AWS for Your Business
Many retailers and e-commerce leaders have migrated their websites to Amazon Cloud (Nordstorm, GameStop, Zalando, Nike, etc) and succeeded. The reasonable question arises: why do they choose AWS considering that Amazon is their biggest rival? It’s because Amazon has a great experience in e-commerce that is used in creating the best tools and services for retailers. With AWS, you receive a lot of competitive advantages, as outlined below.
Being "the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform”, AWS provides an all-in-one solution for global programming, storage (Amazon Drive), database, analytics, and deployment services. Using AWS helps businesses grow faster, reduce IT costs, create and scale applications. One of the biggest advantages of AWS is that by storing your data on Amazon Cloud Drive you still legally own it, in spite of the fact that all your data is located somewhere in a remote Amazon data center. Here are some major factors that make AWS a preferential choice for e-commerce projects of different levels.
You Get More Traffic and Go Global
Over 213 million visitors visited Amazon website in 2020. Being among the most popular shopping apps in the United States, Amazon online shopping mobile application has contributed to the Amazon market domination. Amazon generates massive traffic, therefore, integrating your website with Amazon gives you a great potential to reach a wide target audience. Customers have no longer to search for your company via search engines, they will just discover you through a product placed on Amazon store. As Amazon’s traffic has already existed, it means that you will spend less time and money on advertising and promotion. Moreover, with Amazon, you start working internationally and have a chance to increase your sales in a completely different global market. Of course, going global means more responsibilities, as the key to new customers and orders totally depends on the product quality as well as timely and professional order fulfillment.
You Get Access to a Reliable Marketplace and Better Customer Engagement
Most customers tend to trust shops on Amazon. The leading reasons why they choose Amazon shopping is an excellent delivery service, a great selection of products, price and safety. Selling through a trusted marketplace adds a value to your products. When buying on Amazon, a customer expects that your product meets high standards and is quality. Since Amazon uses CDN (Content Distribution Network), it delivers faster personalized experiences to the customers. It provides business owners with a secure and comprehensive portfolio of analyzed data about customer experience. These highly developed analytic tools eliminate the guessing of your customers’ needs.
You Receive Cost-Effective and Secure Services
When using Amazon services, you have to pay only for storage place, computing power and other resources that you actually used. This “pay-as-you-go” concept let retailers plan a budget wisely as well as reduce the risk of missing capacity. With AWS auto-scaling service, you can monitor your application and predict performance at a lower cost. When the demand decreases, auto-scaling reduces the resources to fit the need. Regarding safe data storage and protection, AWS provides a world-class security due to: 24/7 immediate access to security experts, built-in firewall that let you restrict access to the needed data, as well as multi-factor authentication and data encryption.
What Is AWS And What Can You Do With It?
Amazon is known not only for being an e-commerce platform. It also provides more than 100 wide-range services to meet any business need, including virtual servers and cloud storage. With AWS (Amazon Web Services), you can leverage the power of the cloud by adding more storage space and functionality as the site develops. Whether you’re looking for a marketing or e-commerce website, AWS offers a lot of website hosting options.
Here are only some of the services that could be handy for your website growth:
- Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) - the most popular and easy-to-use service allowing to store your website files and backups. You can store and retrieve any amount of data at any time.
- EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) - a virtual Amazon server through which you can configure CPU, storage memory as well as networking resources. Using EC2 is like you are renting a server from AWS on an hourly basis.
- RDS (Relational Database Service) - lets you set up and scale a database in the Amazon Cloud. Depending on the application, a specific database is selected, such as mysql, postgres, etc.
- Amazon Athena - is used to analyze big data located on Amazon S3. It’s serverless, so you don’t need any infrastructure to install.
- Cloudwatch - lets you monitor infrastructure, respond to the system performance changes, optimize your resources, etc. With the help of CloudWatch, it’s possible to detect malicious behavior, set alarms, visualize logs and metrics.
- Lambada - is used to run a code for any type of application on a schedule without dedicated server.
- IAM (Identity and Access Management) - allows you to separate and manage access to AWS services in the most secure way.
Having understood Amazon Cloud benefits you decide for it, but what’s next? What is the core solution to successful integration and functioning of your business in AWS? Though there are a lot of hands-on tutorials for Amazon Web Services, it can be tricky to choose the right and economically beneficial services for your website. In order to effectively integrate your website with AWS, achieve better results for a reasonable cost, you need the help of a professional. An experienced DevOps engineer is what you need. But who is that mysterious character in your team?
What Is About and Why You Need A DevOps Engineer
Your competence may go far beyond your product elaboration, but the more narrow the specialist is the better he performs. AWS is a relatively new platform that requires a detailed knowledge of its architecture, bearing in mind security points, cost, and performance. DevOps engineer is the one to help you handle these issues as well as help you avoid common mistakes. DevOps Engineer is there to make your website integration balanced, unified and automated. Combining and promoting the collaboration between the team of developers and operational team need not only certain skills, but an entire philosophy. In plain words, DevOps Engineer is the one who’s perfectly informed about all the innovations on the platform and can help minimize the cost of certain services and make all the process run smoothly.
Here are the main reasons why you need a DevOps:
- DevOps is a cost-savvy solution for your e-commerce business
DevOps deals with cost optimization, so you can invest your money wisely. DevOps engineer assists in selecting a billing model and planning the expenses. For example, setting up a working configuration allowing you to delete old backups, logs, and unnecessary media files can significantly reduce overall costs.
- DevOps is the best advisor in choosing Amazon services
All AWS services have different prices and solve different tasks. If we talk just about databases, there are a bunch of options to choose from on AWS, each with their own pros and cons. DevOps engineers can help you choose the optimal services from the whole variety of Amazon resources. By evaluating the expected load on the application, they will make the best choice and help set up correct services for your type of website.
- DevOps helps perform a successful integration with AWS
DevOps engineers will tune all the services and interconnect them in the way that you will have maximum benefit from each AWS service. They will add your website to Amazon so that it works efficiently with no delays and errors. The DevOps task is to ensure that all products, prices are displayed correctly, the shopping cart software as well as the data about sold and delivered products are working properly.
- DevOps provides a necessary help in designing a safe microservice architecture
DevOps can help spread the API for the mobile application and the desktop version of the site to different servers in order to reduce the load and ensure fault tolerance. Such measures protect the site from crashing in case of a huge number of simultaneous requests. As strict security requirements are imposed on the businesses that use personal data and banking details, using DevOps workflows can become handy. They allow codifying security requirements and minimizing the chance of human errors or malicious intents.
Takeaways
AWS Cloud is one of the top cloud solutions for retailers. It’s because most of the AWS products are tailored for online retailers and combine the best practices gained by Amazon as the largest pioneer in e-commerce. As Amazon provides services available for both start-ups and high-growth global platforms, it grows with your business. With each new stage of your product development, you can expand the storage, add more services and features. Moreover, using AWS allows you to cut IT costs by saving money on in-house maintenance and management. If you need an all-in-one solution for your e-commerce website with constant access to data, a new global target audience, fast and reliable connection, efficient scaling and monitoring tools, opt for AWS. Our DevOps will help you to effectively integrate your website with Amazon, to set a smooth and efficient work of your website enabling to bring more customers and achieve new sales.
