Disclaimer-mark
This is a user generated content for MyStory, a YourStory initiative to enable its community to contribute and have their voices heard. The views and writings here reflect that of the author and not of YourStory.
Disclaimer-mystory

How DevOps Helps eCommerce Companies Excel?

How DevOps Helps eCommerce Companies Excel?

Thursday July 18, 2019,

8 min Read

It always feels bad if you have to face the situation where you stop getting the latest updates in the area of your interest. And this may turn into a nightmare for the businesses who lose the trust of their customers because of their slow updating process.

E-commerce industry could be placed on top in this situation as a lot of people’s expectations are attached to these industries.


E-commerce sites that are the most widely used industries of this age could not afford to keep their customers away from the latest updates of the technologies. They need to have a highly updating system as customers are expecting a lot to them.


So because of rapid change in technologies, it is a little difficult to satisfy the customer’s expectations. E-commerce industries are required to stay updated with all new technologies in order to stay connected with their customers.


If the E-commerce industries want to work on the customer’s satisfaction, then they are required to adopt DevOps-driven technical and business processes in order to develop their software products.


What actually DevOps is?

DevOps

DevOps is known as the process of optimizing the development process with the help of modern automation tools and fresh methods. This results in improving the tried-and-tested formulae, by ensuring the business to become faster than their competitors with the help of rapid iteration process while keeping in consideration exceptional flexibility.


Challenges that E-commerce industries face to meet the customer’s requirement

Customers can access the shopping experience electronically in so many ways and this experience could be done using laptops, mobiles, and tablets to interactive displays. These devices are having different size, pixel resolution, and other aspects. But customers want to have the same experience in all these devices. It usually happens that they may switch between devices and endless transition from place to another.


Apart from this, customers desire to be able to check the left items in the stock, compare prices and want to read reviews of other customers. So, this process of the back-end is highly difficult to be maintained regarding the latest information again and again because of the volume of the data.

Additionally, customers are also desiring to try their clothes with the help of Augmented reality technology. With the help of this technology, they can have features like mixing and matching, preview placement of furniture or other items, etc.


Here begin the challenges for the developers when they have to amend, enhance and deploy the current software with the least number of bugs. Customers cannot stop desiring expectations of online experience, so it is necessary for the e-commerce industries to make continuous changes in the code in order to add new features, to improve the performance of the existing system, so that they can always make fresh contact with their customers.


So in this age of competition, it is little difficult to compete with this environment and keep customers updated but this issue of the e-commerce industries could be resolved with the cooperation of the IT team who keeps the ability to deliver quality services on time.


How DevOps can help e-commerce teams achieve their goals?

Iterative Deployments

DevOps Achieve


Here are some of the tips which can you how DevOps can optimize the process of e-commerce. Let’s have a look below:


Iterative deployments

There is a need for interactive deployments which means that e-commerce industry should always keep updated their websites. If this upgrading process is robust and fast then the deployment process in DevOps could be done frequently without the need for human interference. You can deploy the code directly into the live environment.


Continuous Innovation

There should be continuous innovation in e-commerce organizations if they want to compete with their competitors.


If a particular e-commerce industry fails to upgrade the features and functionality fast enough, then it may not be able to face the challenges that come on time to time in the market. And this results to lose the trust of the customers as well as a presence in the online world.


Have a look at the traditional SDLC approach visualized below:

Continous Integration

This process is basically based on the concept that the whole process of e-commerce starting from the software development, traveling to its deployment and leading to its release is done one by one. The continuous feedback could not be taken as there could be seen no communication among Devs, Ops, and QA specialists. so, in this kind of process, it is a little difficult to predict the future and make changes on time.


But this is such a serious problem for the e-commerce industries as these are the platforms which are rapidly changing and progressing. That is why they are required to cope up or to switch towards the rapidly changing techniques.


This is what actually the job of DevOps. Have a look at the DevOps approach that connects every phase of the SDLC:

SDLC Model


This process basically believe in the agile method and in the fast delivering of the new product features with less number of complexities. This makes changes keeping in consideration the needs of the markets and this is highly beneficial for e-commerce industries who have to struggle in order to meet the demands of the market.


Automated testing

The major aim of automated testing is to deliver the code according to the desired blueprint and which can fight against new bugs in the system. This helps in receiving continuous feedback that will result in a stable e-commerce platform.

Automated Testing

Continuous integration

Continuous integration is basically the process of integrating new code into the mainline once and many a time in the whole day. It does not believe in the process of integrating the code once towards the end.

It is the process of testing a new code again and again in order to make sure that it does not impact the existing code and thus to believe that the system will function smoothly in the future.


Ensure Cooperation Among Team Members

Team Members


In order to understand this point, we can take an example of one of the E-commerce hosting providers that is Shopify which has achieved benefit with the potency of the DevOps. Shopify which is well-known supports many types of merchants. And this is well known that it is a little difficult to be in contact with each and every merchant. To solve this problem, Shopify planned to adopt DevOps in late 2015. They found the remarkable result by late 2016 they started getting updates more quickly.


How this is helpful?

This is process could be seen helpful in the way as it allows the team members to communicate with each other in order to discuss the development process at every phase.


In one company there may be various types of teams but if we talk about the e-commerce industry there could be definitely seen various types of teams like a developer, a designer, a marketing team, and a sales team.


If the process of communication is strong among these teams then it would help them to achieve their goals easily along with improving software delivery.


Incremental cycles

Incremental Cycle


As it is already told that the e-commerce industry is required to be always updated with frequent changes. If DevOps process is done on an Agile basis, it can result in rapid and incremental cycles of development. This could be helpful in the management of almost all constant changes. This rapid and incremental cycle of development leads to proceed the proceed hurriedly towards testing and further. Therefore, you should hire ecommerce developer who works on DevOps enabled process so that you can save your time & money.


Scale development of revenue

It is very difficult to determine how much money should be spent on E-commerce development. Every organization aims to generate revenue. For this, it is needed that the budget should be maintained at the beginning of the project and always keep the estimate into consideration.


One of the major solutions of this issue is to follow the DevOps process which can help you eradicate various problems and scale your effort according to the requirement.


Make use of a flexible budget as this is one of the best ways which can manage investments. Always try to remain fixed to the set budget as this is the best way to see yourself in positions like you can afford the money or not.


Collaborative Approach

Collaborative Approach


It is really important to follow the tradition of a collaborative approach in order to ship the new items, bug-free functionalities, and features on a regular basis. If you really want to reduce the commitment of bug creeping into the systems and to get rid of the issue that is irritating, the whole process that is Development, Operations, and Quality need to come together.


Final words

After going through this piece of writing, you may have come to know what actually the importance of DevOps in an E-commerce world. Yes! It is true that DevOps can play a major role in the E-commerce industries because E-commerce industries are one of the fastest growing industries that are needed to keep their customers up to date.


Apart from that, this article is helping you to become aware that in how many ways this DevOps process is helping E-commerce development companies to keep their customers as well as merchants happy with the help of its agile method.


Keeping into consideration this importance, various E-commerce development companies in Dubai have started taking DevOps service so that they can keep their customers in touch with them.