Supporting growth and seamless online shopping for the holidays

Retailers must be well-prepared for Christmas, Black Friday, and other holiday festivities as these are some of the year’s busiest shopping days. Increasing numbers of retailers and consumers are going digital. At approximately 95 billion SEK, Swedes were the largest e-commerce spenders among citizens of the Nordic countries in 2019. 

Furthermore, worldwide online shopping rose by approximately 60% after the initial Coronavirus outbreak. As such, online retail businesses everywhere need to start preparing for the upcoming Christmas peak. There are three key factors to ensure optimal customer satisfaction and support growth: speed, reliability, and scalability. How can Google Cloud help achieve seamless online retail experience? Please keep reading to find out.

The surge in online shopping is here to stay, a recent McKinsey survey among retail executives has revealed. Online penetration is expected to remain up to 13 percent above pre-COVID levels. However, as the popularity of online shopping has increased, so too has the volume of pain points experienced by customers. Google’s Smart Shopper survey has shown that 35% of Swedes faced issues while shopping online in 2020, compared to 27% the previous year.

Slow customer support response time and slow websites are among the most notable pain points. A website crash during peak traffic times can impact both brand perception and revenue. Even a mere one-second delay in loading mobile page can affect conversion rates by up to 20%, SOASTA has shown. To offer your customers a smooth online shopping experience this Christmas, Google Cloud is providing smart load balancing solutions which render crashes and slowness a thing of the past. With custom peak season operations and technical architecture reviews, Google Cloud’s Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) Program helps deliver a seamless shopping experience during peak traffic times. The eCommerce Hosting product, for example, provides flexible, reliable, and scalable hosting solutions for online retailers. Below, we will explain why the latter is indispensable.

In 2019, 60% of the Swedish population sold goods over the internet, the Internet Foundation in Sweden has shown. Post-COVID, the expected financial crisis may drive the shift to more sustainable and affordable purchases. A 2018 survey by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, for example, showed that 62% of Swedes bought second-hand clothing because of the cheaper price. Tradera, Sweden’s leading online second-hand marketplace, aims to facilitate the shift to more sustainable purchases. Tradera currently serves 2.5 million members selling pre-loved products.

On the technical side of things, Tradera previously owned 25 physical servers running 190 virtual machines, 36 servers running applications, and 150 million images, all of which were on site. But to accommodate the growing interest in online second-hand shopping, scalability is key. For Tradera, moving to cloud-based infrastructure would eliminate their existing concerns about reaching the limits of their existing infrastructure. Tradera thus decided to migrate all its operations to Google Cloud. This literally happened overnight: between 21 and 22 May 2020. Data was transported and unified on BigQuery, Google Cloud’s data warehouse, without any drop in accuracy. Currently, enhanced scalability opportunities are enabling Tradera to accommodate growth and traffic peaks. This means customers will not have to deal with website slowness or crashes. Whether it’s Christmas or a regular day, Tradera’s website developers can now spend more time fulfilling Tradera’s mission: driving the transition to sustainable shopping, by shifting societal consumption patterns from linear to circular.

Google Cloud is the go-to partner to prepare your online retail channels for the future. For Tradera, migrating to Google Cloud created scalable, fast, and reliable online shopping experiences, as well as increased growth capabilities. We’re looking forward to meeting you this Wednesday to discuss how we can support you in preparing for the holiday season.