Six E-Commerce Essentials for Running Your SMB in the Cloud

If you had the ability to change anything about how your small or medium business (SMB) sells online, what would you do? For some owners such as yourself, they might want a website with better uptime and payment systems that detect fraudulent transactions. Others might be laser-focused on how many of their visitors are actually converting to become customers. Answering questions online in real-time—instead of bogging down customer support—is likely a popular topic, too. The good news is that all of these are possible on a website hosted in the cloud.

You don’t need to work for a large company (with a dedicated IT team) to take advantage of the e-commerce world which is a multi-trillion-dollar industry. In this blog post, we will explore the six ways in which Amazon Web Services can empower SMB e-commerce businesses to succeed with similar solutions larger companies use in the cloud.

Investing in customer experience

Customer Obsession is the first Amazon Leadership Principle and has guided the growth of Amazon.com from its inception, to its current position as a market leader in e-commerce. It should also be no surprise that it can be a top priority for any company looking to capture the attention of a market that is in constant flux and powered by consumers with easy access to more choices than ever. Fortunately, even small business owners can use a scaled down version of Customer Obsession to innovate their companies.

For example, creating a seamless customer experience that makes transactions easier is one of the most straightforward ways of increasing sales and serving customers. It may sound overly simplistic, but try this: go to your SMB’s website and see how many clicks (and minutes) it takes to purchase a good or service. Does the website load slowly or appear disjointed on different devices? Can someone easily navigate to different pages if they want to browse more? These exercises help you empathize with your customers and empowers you to make necessary changes.

Now to take action. Your website should also have a simple, intuitive interface that is easy to navigate and search. With Amazon Cloud Search and secure customer data on Amazon Personalize, businesses can implement AI into their website and offer suggestions to like-minded consumers. This makes it easy for customers to find exactly what they’re looking for.

Learn more about how you can host your SMB’s website or app on AWS to respond to improve user experience.

Modernizing customer support across all communication channels

Customer service is a priority for all businesses, as it plays a crucial role in retaining customers and maintaining a positive brand image. Poor customer service—whether it’s across phone, email, social media, or another means—might motivate your customers to look for alternative options. By supporting these channels with prompt and helpful service, businesses can ensure that their customers’ needs are met and their online shopping experiences are positive. When you host these efforts in the cloud, it enables distributed teams to connect and reduce overhead, on-premises costs.

Amazon Connect provides SMBs with the ability to easily scale with an AI-powered contact center. With it, you can quickly resolve shipping, product quality, and other customer support issues while delighting our customers and increasing retention rates. If you’re new to this concept, we recommend reading this free eBook about evaluating if your small business is ready for a cloud-based contact center.

Another option is to seek out customer support software built specifically for SMBs that requires minimal setup. Freshdesk helps business owners like you setup ticketing systems, automate repetitive processes, help call agents collaborate on similar issues, and report out customer sentiment. Learn more about this free trial available to AWS customers and pricing.

Getting near real-time insights into your company’s sales performance

Whether you’re selling a good or a service, you need to know how your website is performing on a regular basis. In the past, websites were viewed as novelties, but by today’s standards they can offer a drove of data previously unavailable. If your SMB’s website currently has its analytics configured, you might need someone to manually pull results for reporting. But this tedious process can be improved.

If you’re looking for a way to unify your data cost-effectively, we recommend Amazon Redshift. Customers often use it to improve financial and demand forecasts, monetize their data, and combine datasets. Once you have that data, you’ll need a way to visualize its impact. Amazon QuickSight as a tool that tells you what you need to know about your business performance. With QuickSight, your team can use modern interactive dashboards, paginated reports, embedded analytics, and natural language queries. Set up reports to arrive on whichever cadence you need to track customer trends and sales. The power of QuickSight is that it allows you to pull in various data sources (such as websites, sales reports, and more) so you can compare metrics and look for what needs to be improved or scaled.

Fanatics, the online sports retailer, wanted to enhance its business intelligence capabilities. They needed to find a more cost-effective and scalable way to store and analyze its site data. To do that, the company decided to move its data to AWS Cloud for easier scalability. Fanatics also sought a seamless method of quickly migrating five different applications to the cloud. They are now able to analyze the huge volumes of data from its transactional, e-commerce, and back-office systems due in part to Redshift. While Fanatics likely has more data than your SMB, AWS services are scalable no matter the size of the business.

Creating user friendly, omnichannel designs

Businesses need to make their site mobile-friendly. This is a vital step as over 50 percent of online shopping in the United States is now done through mobile devices. This includes ensuring that the site is text is easy to read, buttons are easy to click on, and navigation is simple. Creating an omni-channel experience will help businesses become more robust. This means that the site should be integrated with all other available platforms, such as social media accounts and, ideally, brick-and-mortar stores.

Many SMBs do not have the staff to do this on their own. However, we have a robust network of AWS Partner Network consultants than can help optimize your website in the cloud. Pricing varies based on a number of factors such as size of job, data to be migrated, and more. By utilizing the them, customers can augment their staff or offload entire projects to trusted, AWS Certified third-parties with proven track records of success. These experts go through a rigorous certification process and are audited on a regular basis. By following these best practices, customers can create a user-friendly omni-channel site designed to drive more sales and retain customers.

Attaining search engine visibility

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to a website through organic search engines. For an e-commerce website, SEO can be particularly effective because it helps to improve visibility and drive more potential customers to the site. By optimizing your website’s content and structure, businesses can improve their rankings in search engine results pages which can lead to more organic traffic.

To rank on a search engine, it’s important to have great Core Web Vital metrics. Amazon Cloudfront helps improve Core Web Vital Metrics by reducing loading times, improving website response times, and delivering a better user experience. Though example is somewhat technical in nature, it could be valuable to share with whomever manages your SMB’s website operations.

Streamlining shopping cart and secure payment processes

Security in our number one job at AWS. A smart, secure shopping cart and streamlined payment system are essential for any e-commerce site. To attract and retain customers, businesses must provide a simple and seamless payment process.

AWS customer eVitamins, a health and beauty online retailer, needed a way to avoid security issues, keep customer info safe, and prevent unintended access to the company’s data. Thomas Wick, president of eVitamins, said this about AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), “The WAF Security Automations solution is like a dream come true because it has made security so much easier, better, and more scalable.” On AWS, eVitamins company reduced both IT overhead and incident response time by 90 percent. They also had near-zero website downtime to minimize revenue loss. Regardless of company size, automating security with a firewall can enable you to create a safer environment for your customers.

Why should your SMB power its e-commerce engine with AWS?

Modern e-commerce businesses are thriving, thanks to the scalability and flexibility offered by cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services. SMBs have relatively small IT budgets and the benefit of being in the cloud means you only pay for what you need. Maintaining on-premises datacenters can be expensive to manage—especially if your company has growth aspirations. We provide a comprehensive suite of tools and services designed to support businesses of all sizes. With AWS, e-commerce businesses can efficiently manage their online operations, scale their infrastructure to meet growing demand, and innovate rapidly to stay ahead in a competitive market.

Conclusion

The world of e-commerce is full of opportunity and SMBs need to optimize their infrastructure to take advantage of new tools and services, to scale their offerings, and to capture new customers. These businesses also need to build and operate in a cost-efficient manner, with the ability to scale resources up and down as needed to optimize costs. AWS has the services, tools, and expertise to enable your business to begin—or improve—selling online. For further insight into how AWS can support your small business you can contact us.