The global pandemic has impacted virtually every aspect of our lives, and is cementing e-commerce as an essential business service, rather than a mere option. Amid COVID-19, unprecedented numbers of consumers are turning to online shopping as an alternative, combining availability, convenience, and greater safety, while creating extraordinary opportunities for those business that can seize them.
I wanted to share with you a few inspiring stories from our e-commerce customers that show how businesses can thrive with agility and technology (combined with some elbow grease and determination).
E-commerce amid COVID-19: Examples of companies transitioning successfully
When our customer was faced with the closure of their malls and stores in the Middle East region, they decided to rely on their pre-existing, e-commerce website. Although initially limited in capabilities, they were able to turn it into a viable channel capable of processing a sizeable volume of orders while delivering the same outstanding customer shopping experience that their physical malls would do under normal circumstances.
In less than 3 weeks, this customer built multi-site, multi-brand, multi-catalog online stores, allowing their clientele to browse their merchandise catalogs, built on top of the pre-existing website.
On the backend, their IT team built dynamic new product taxonomies for a multi-warehouse, omnichannel view of their stocks. Our customer re-used the pre-existing check out and logistics processes for order fulfillment.
A similar story happened with an European customer in the B2B food delivery business who was faced with the overnight closure of all their main partners such as schools, hospitals, government offices or restaurants.
True to their mission to serve their community, they felt the need to pivot to serve individual customers who, at times of hardship, needed food delivery more than ever before. This customer adopted the existing B2B code base and built on top of it a direct-to-consumer site. Using our headless capabilities, they built a new front-end and released the critical browse-call-collect capabilities – all that in 3 weeks.
What do these stories have in common?
First and foremost, that ‘anything’ is possible. During times of hardship, technology allows brands to stay true to their missions and core values and act on them very quickly.
We humans operate at our best when we are primarily moved by the desire to help each other, reaching out and supporting our communities, more than the quintessential business objective to drive profits per our strategic quarterly plans.
Secondly, these stories illustrate how an agile deployment mindset can help business thrive at times of uncertainty.
Agility is required to simplify processes and operations, change the way teams work, reprioritize the roadmap, and decide which capabilities are to be developed in what sequence. I always recommend adopting the crawl-walk-run-fly approach:
- Start with defining your minimum viable product
- Work in small increments and release functionality on the go
- Always ask yourself what you can do, and how fast
- Release it in frequent releases, rather than think about the ideal end-product that you may be able to release in 6 months
Thirdly, adopt Cloud, because that deployment model is more agile and easier to access remotely. This is especially critical at times when no one can physically go to the office as before. Cloud deployments allow for automation of all processes whether it be creation of new environments or build/deploy processes.
Cloud and agility rely on a strong collaboration models between your software partners, hosting partner, your own teams, and your other partners.
Collaboration gets easier when a strong alignment is achieved between the teams and the leadership layer – and remember – achieving a lasting consensus is possible when brands act according to their values and mission.
Adopting Cloud and agile methodologies will allow business thrive during COVID-19 times and well beyond – I have little doubt over that.
