How Can Microservices Help Omnichannel Retailers

There is rapid change in the way people shop in today’s times. Even retailers find it difficult to predict what change will come about tomorrow. Retailers have understood that only an attractive line-up of products does not guarantee success in the retail business.
 
One has to be supported by the latest technology. The ones who succeeded were those who placed their customers’ needs at the center and created attractive offers for them, independent of time or location. The microservices architecture is a technological innovation that seems to help retailers do all of these. A recent report says that approximately 77% of respondents (1,502 software engineers, engineers, systems and technical architects, and decision-makers) in a survey have adopted microservices, with 92% experiencing success with microservices. That is how popular microservices are.
 
Many areas of life are facing unprecedented changes, and all of these are happening too fast now. Many businesses are struggling with monolithic application architectures that are too complex to scale up or down according to modern-day business needs. Many large businesses, including retail giants, have also successfully moved into microservices architecture and have become market leaders in innovative products. Let us briefly examine what microservices have in store for retailers.

Microservices Architecture in Retail

Developed from the basic idea of service-oriented architectures (SOAs), from the earlier elaborate infrastructures, microservices (the name was coined a decade ago) consist of small independent services that are sufficiently decoupled from one another via RESTful APIs.

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What do microservices mean for retailers? It is observed that microservices architecture is an essential part of digital innovation that is causing the shift in retailing practices. Technologists have transformed into new roles of business enablers, and they work in close contact with functional specialists in the departments of marketing, product, and operations.

Retail giants like Amazon have created smaller IT products that are focused on user experience and are actualized by technology experts. Amazon went on to establish similar smaller services that were built and operated by individual teams. Though the services communicated with one another via APIs, the team that built the service was wholly responsible for their creation.
 
How Retailers Meet Business Goals With Microservices

Any microservices setup includes an API setup that is used to communicate between the various microservices.In the case of retail brands, this means integration possibility with different partner solutions according to evolving customer expectations and comprehensive customer experiences. These could be last-mile deliveries, retail edge location stock replacements, shop experiences, etc.

Therefore, APIs enable the loose coupling between the different services, and therefore, the retailer can make changes with practically no disturbance to the other parts of the system. The microservices architecture is thus enabling the next-gen enterprise applications for the retail industry.

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Till recently, microservices in most architectures were designed to take action only after a series of steps were taken. With APIs, when an interesting event happens, the service emits a new event via any one event channel. This channel decides the nature of the action that is to be taken.

This kind of omnichannel action helps retailers help retailers that are on the path of digital transformation. They can add new sales channels or different product types. An example would be a global travel firm having local adventure trip catalogs for which customers should book separately.

Each channel has its own content management features, UIs, and transactional systems. Any retail business can extend their product templates and catalogues almost instantly with headless microservices architecture and API-driven systems, as well as integrate them with other functions such as payments and checkouts.

Benefits of Microservices Architecture in Retail

Most retailers pursue microservices architecture because it delivers business value. Driving a more efficient retail landscape, microservices positively impact business revenues if used correctly. Other key benefits observed are:

Aids Acceleration

When the services are owned by independent teams, features can be developed quickly and added to the retailer’s package. This alignment around the services encourages the individual teams to build iteratively at a faster pace.

Improves Agility

A robust set of APIs will enable retailers to roll out new features in a jiffy. If deployment problems develop, the feature can be rolled back at will as the service is an independent one. It can be rolled out again when the troubleshooting is over.

Availability of Flexible Options

The retailer application can independently deploy components and thus get new features, thus facilitating easy prototyping. This helps the retailers meet the customers’ latest expectations.
 
Read our blog "Infusing Retail Edge Architecture with Microservices-Benefits".

Resilience of Code

For any modification, there is no requirement to play with the master codebase; instead, only the service codebase has to be suitably modified. This directly translates to less downtime and a more active system.

Quickly Scalable

For retailers, many times there has to be a decoupling between the logic of the system and the scaling up or down of the other parts depending on sudden demand surges. Microservices reside in the cloud, helping to scale specific functionalities only.
 
Conclusion

For retailers concerned about their businesses evolving at breakneck speed, microservices architecture provides a consistent foundation that enables the most up-to-date customer experiences.
 
How Can SayOne Help You
 
At SayOne, we offer independent and stable services that have separate development aspects as well as maintenance advantages. We build microservices specially suited for individuals' businesses in different industry verticals. In the longer term, this would allow your organization or business to enjoy a sizeable increase in both growth and efficiency. We create microservices as APIs with security and the application built in. We provide SDKs that allow for the automatic creation of microservices.
 
Our comprehensive services in microservices development for start-ups, SMBs, and enterprises start with extensive microservices feasibility analysis to provide our clients with the best services. We use powerful frameworks for our custom-built microservices for different organizations. Our APIs are designed to enable fast iteration, easy deployment, and significantly less time to market. In short, our microservices are dexterous and resilient and deliver the security and reliability required for the different functions.
 
Are you on the lookout for a supportive microservices vendor? Call us today!