The Eid festive season is just around the corner. During this festive period, e-Commerce and Online Travel Agents (OTAs) undoubtedly will receive increase and fluctuation on traffic. This acts as a positive response from various promo programs that they have prepared annually. These programs are being held to use the momentum of national public holidays and to optimize the sale of their products and services. The big question will be, are the IT infrastructure of these e-Commerce and Indonesian OTAs ready to face traffic explosion ahead of this moment?
Based on Snapcart Indonesia’s research, which was published on May 9, 2019, 91% of 1,000 respondents stated that they would shop on e-Commerce such as Tokopedia, Shopee, Lazada and others. Of the total respondents, only 56% of respondents stated that they would also shop offline. This change in consumer behaviour shows the impact of the digital transformation process which is currently underway in various sectors. In Indonesia alone, this trend is evenly experienced in the Greater Jakarta and other big cities. Given that Indonesia’s population is concentrated on Java, e-Commerce and OTAs retailers are faced with the amount of traffic that can increase exponentially in the near future.
Running through the data received from previous Ramadan period, the increase in sales that occur through mobile devices can reach up to 69% on mobile sites and up to 41% on mobile applications. Whereas the increase in sales through desktop is only around 53%. With this many in-App promos conducted by e-Commerce and the OTAs this year, a significant surge in mobile platforms traffic can surely be predicted.
During this period, there is a higher chance that companies would receive complaints from consumers who have access failure on their sites or applications. This is due to the lack of infrastructure capacities and IT networks from e-Commerce or OTAs service providers. These problem stem from insufficient infrastructure and lack of executive planning to increase server capacity during a surge in demand. The consequence can impact directly on business, both on financial aspects and brand equity aspects.
To face these holiday season traffic flux and support sales targets achievement, the IT department is expected to have enough time to prepare strategic infrastructure planning during the surge in traffic that will surely occur.
Keep in mind that when you force your IT to perform beyond their infrastructure capacity to process more user activities and business transactions, consumers will face varieties of unsatisfactory user experience issues, such as long application load times, transaction failures on applications, slow link access, and others. Disruptions on the user experience will lead to direct impact on income and ultimately make consumers turn to competitors for answering their needs in shopping online easily and quickly.
To avoid potential losses and maximizing business productivity during the holiday periods, the flexibility offered by cloud technology is the correct and effective solution. Scalability as the main flexibility feature offered by cloud technology can answer the challenges of the entire retail business when facing the holiday season.
Scalability includes the ability to increase workload and capacity in existing IT infrastructure (hardware, software, etc.) in minutes without affecting performance when handling peak customer activity. This scalability feature also helps in terms of adding data storage capacity without having to buy additional devices, where users can simply add the capacity provided by cloud providers.
More importantly, the scalability feature allows you to reduce workload and capacity as easily as you can increase it. After the end of the holiday season and when customer activity decreases, you can return to the previous usage level and only pay for what you use. This means you no longer need to invest large amounts of IT resources that are only used for a short period of time of peak season. The elasticity of the cloud, allows users to dynamically develop new virtual machines and also deactivate inactive virtual machines at ease.
Generally, retails and OTA entrepreneurs develop partnerships with professional IT service providers to manage corporate cloud. Telkomtelstra as the leading Managed Cloud Services provider in Indonesia is able to deliver trusted professional IT support to maintain the sustainability of the cloud that is critically needed especially during high traffic period, with guaranteed security. By combining other services, especially Managed Connectivity and Security, Telkomtelstra’s support allows your IT Department the freedom to fully focus on projects that have a greater impact on the company such as creating consumer loyalty systems and increasing user engagement on the company’s invested platform.