Retailers and Microservices - 3 Ways to Boost Innovation

Moving at the speed of the latest innovations and trends is truly a challenge in the retail industry. New technologies emerge every day, providing a plethora of new devices, channels, and experiences. Consumers are increasingly discovering things they like on social media. You, as a retailer, might easily engage with customers in-store or online, but these fresh, inventive experiences are generally off the table.

Inventiveness and creativity aren’t the issues. Rather, technological difficulties are holding back retailers from innovation. Traditional commerce platforms excel at tried-and-true browser-based commerce, but they aren't flexible enough to support trade across new channels of customer involvement. Many retailers use bulky monolithic eCommerce systems, and keeping them up-to-date with the latest technology is slow, painful, and resource extensive. 

 
That’s where microservices step in. Retailers with a focus on speed and innovation should consider adding microservices to their commerce platform. 
Microservices, as the name implies, are self-contained utilities that each perform a specific business function. They deconstruct platform monoliths — such as a typical commerce platform — into individual elements, such as orders, checkouts, shopping carts, and inventory, so that they may be utilized in any customer experience and assembled in a way that fits the retailer's specific goal. 

When combined, retailers and microservices can work wonders together. Businesses are already adopting microservices. Most adopters are successfully using microservices. In a survey by O’Reilly, a majority of 1502 respondents (about 54%) claimed that their use of microservices was "mostly successful." 

Using Microservices In Retail

Let's say you're a retailer looking to launch a new feature: self-checkout. You've been inspired by Amazon Go stores that don't have cashiers, and you want your customers to be able to scan a product in the store, pay with their phone, and display their receipt when they leave. Instead of traveling to a typical cash register, buyers will be able to purchase your goods right when they want them.

Let's imagine you own a fashion retail store and want to make your dressing room mirrors available for purchase. You want your customers to be able to look up product information, call a store worker for a different size, or check out from the mirror. This, once again, engages buyers at the point of inspiration and generates a fresh stream of revenue for you.

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In both these cases, your existing traditional commerce platform may have order and payment functionalities in place. If you want to make the above changes, it might even take months. Retailers and microservices implementations enable the opportunity to speed up this process. You can quickly and easily extend your existing commerce infrastructure to the next new, path-breaking use case. Retail marketing teams frequently come up with game-changing brand ideas, only to be met by exorbitant costs and deadlines on the technical side. Retailers trying out microservices implementations have the power to add new features to their existing commerce applications without any hassles.

Many retail and tech giants have made the shift from monolithic systems to microservices.

Retailers and Microservices - Boosting Innovations

Take Charge of the Complexity

Micro-services allow you to add an innovative layer to your existing technology, enabling you to adapt to consumer demands in significantly shorter time frames. But, given the complexities of the shopping journey, how can you accurately determine what your clients truly require?

If we take the instance of an airport, it’s clear that the people in airports are solely there to travel. You can correctly predict a person's exact route from entering the airport to boarding the plane. That means you can quickly discover the primary client touch points and eliminate the friction that is causing the suffering.

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Consumer behavior is significantly less predictable for retailers, and the path is far more challenging. Whether it's an online or in-store visit, the number of possible pain points is practically limitless. So, while micro-services enable firms to make quick adjustments based on evolving client behaviors, designing the proper solution becomes all the more challenging when they are impossible to foresee and pain spots are tough to pinpoint.

Begin by determining where you have genuine digital opportunities. Determine what your customers anticipate from your brand or the overall experience, and then focus on resolving the issues that bother them. 

Prioritize the grievances and get a dedicated team working on a microservices solution, whether it's the opportunity for prospective customers to try on what they're looking for in the store next door or a convoluted payment process. Begin small and see what kind of traction you can get.
Learn about what factors you should keep in mind before picking up a microservices development vendor.

Stop Worrying About Technical Design

When introducing micro-services, many retailers go for a technology-led design approach, and these solutions are frequently firmly buried in the operational parts of their business. In truth, a technological approach can actually limit the good impact that microservices can have on easing user pain points.

Consider that your customer wants to return a product. A normal return procedure is not very smooth. Having customers go into a store only to establish the time of purchase isn’t feasible at all from a user experience perspective. Looking at it solely from a technical standpoint makes it appear nearly impossible to fix.

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Concentrate on the experience you want to create and begin by strategizing in broad strokes, then look at more detailed answers to the specific pain areas you're unearthing. You can continue to experiment and iterate in response to new insights and changing client behaviors by building an inventive layer on top of the more burdensome operational processes.

The key to microservices is that they are, in fact, "micro." If, like many businesses, you recognize that your technology environment has become a monolith and are unsure where to begin, thinking in terms of micro-services allows you to start small and expand on what works.

Finally, there is an operational backbone that must be respected, but with this method, you have the freedom to experiment and learn without affecting the rest of the business. There is less danger and more return.

Introduce Smaller, More Efficient Teams

Retailers frequently rely on a single team to run and maintain all of the microservices deployed in their technical environment. As a result, the distinct micro-services will inevitably converge into a jumbled, interconnected collection of technical infrastructure. On paper, they appear to be autonomous, but in reality, they are all linked. You basically get back to square one, with an inflexible architecture to manage.

When introducing microservices into your organization, make sure you have separate teams and product owners assigned to implement and support them. The concept is that these services would change and adapt independently over time, which would necessitate dedicated attention and supervision. If your budget does not allow for defined teams, make a mental adjustment in how you operate so that each micro-service is evolved and maintained in isolation with complete focus.

Takeaway

It's not a surprise that, with so many changes in the retail market, many businesses are scrambling to keep up with the latest trends, innovations, and technologies. Things are rapidly changing for retailers, and the microservices implementation process makes it incredibly simple to plug in those changes. Companies can develop in relative isolation thanks to microservices, which means they don't have to worry about having a direct influence on the rest of the organization. It's all about taking incremental steps toward real-world solutions.

How Can SayOne Help 

At Sayone, we design and implement microservices systems that do not have complex architectural layers, and this enables the services to deliver exceptionally fast performance. Moreover, we provide services that are significantly decoupled, allowing you to launch independent services and not end up with the usual inter-dependent microservices that work more or less like a monolith.

We design the microservices keeping in mind the margin required to allow for the transition into the new system of your organization’s legacy architecture as well as expand into the cloud system. Our microservices comprise lightweight code, and we provide competitive pricing options for our clients.

Our microservices are built according to the latest international security guidelines that ensure the complete safety of all the data. We also ensure that we deliver the services within the stipulated deadlines and we always guarantee a quick turnaround time for our clients. Equipped with the best infrastructure and the latest tools and technologies, our expert developers will provide you with the best microservices that are easily scalable, enabling a good ROI in the shortest period of time.

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