Introduction
The competitive world of e-commerce has become saturated with several small-scale and large-scale retailers. However, it has expanded to include selling platforms outside of selling websites, and into social networks to enable small sellers, such as jewelry-makers or local pastry bakers, to sell via social media platforms such as Instagram or Facebook.
All of these dynamic changes have mounted the pressure upon e-commerce businesses to establish that ‘something special’ to distinguish them from the competition. Hence, there is a strong need of software/procedures that can strengthen the optimization of the already existing procedures. The solution lies in changing things from within, or to be more specific, by introducing agile business models, such as Salesforce DevOps, to boost their productivity, collaboration, and flexibility. While this model is popular and applied in IT fields, such as software development, e-commerce businesses are yet to discover its innumerable benefits.
Ways Through Which Salesforce DevOps Can Transform E-Commerce Business
Here’s what you can expect Salesforce DevOps to do for your e-commerce business.
1. Continuous Innovation
If progressive e-commerce enterprises have to survive and thrive against tough competition, they have to deliver new features to the market faster than their competitors. This ability has been critical in bringing success and competitive edge to e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Alibaba. Market trends evolve swiftly. An increase in market competition with time indicates that customers do not wait for e-commerce portals to get things right. Instead, they switch to better options available in the market. Organizations that follow lengthy development cycles often realize that one big perfect software release threatens their capability to innovate on a continuous basis. Transformative changes are usually built upon iterative and continuous enhancements.
When new features and functionality are not introduced to customers swiftly, organizations don’t receive real-world feedback that fosters innovation and resolves new market challenges on a constant basis. Consequently, the e-commerce platform remains inconsistent with the dynamic customer requirements and fails to register a strong presence in the online world. The quick, iterative, and agile development processes of Salesforce DevOps focus on swift delivery of the new product features with least difficulty in managing. Moreover, the changes are fully responsive to market needs.
2. Smart Automation Processes
Automation is the crux of success of Salesforce DevOps but, at the same time, there is more to DevOps than just automation. However, organizations also realize that automation in Salesforce DevOps is more than just infrastructure as a code. The purpose of automation in Salesforce DevOps is to establish consistent builds in stable environments. Organizations can deploy next-gen automated configuration management solutions, but without encroaching upon visibility into legacy technologies and processes. Systems may not perform as intended and, therefore, organizations should know what to and what not to automate in the context of their technical and business needs.
e-commerce companies that excel in their areas realize massive business benefits, while also experiencing improvements within the organization. For instance, the right automation will reduce the workload on Development and QA teams, improve cross-functional collaboration between Development and Operations teams, align product development with business strategies, slash costs, and enhance service reliability. Automation can offer models for e-commerce businesses to follow an organized approach to substitute waste processes with swifter, agile and DevOps-enabled software release cycles.
If you have already implemented automation in your marketing strategy, you understand its efficacy for your total productivity. Automation in Salesforce DevOps bestows you the same benefits as that of automation in marketing strategy: it helps your core team focus on hands-on tasks as against frittering away time on laborious manual work. It’s also a cost-cutting strategy that helps you allocate all your resources towards significant project aspects. The beauty of Salesforce DevOps automation is that you can pick and choose the tasks you want to automate, and which require human oversight or admin approval.
3. Strengthening Collaboration & Cooperation
Every cog in the intricate e-commerce machine plays a critical role in its success and growth. Modern-day businesses actually require greater collaboration so that each department can benefit from the knowledge and skills of their peers from other teams in enhancing their own performance.
Salesforce DevOps closely revolves around the idea of continuous collaboration, driven by the cloud, where your teams can seamlessly share files, collaborate in real-time, and brainstorm at will to improve your strategies on the move. To understand this point, let us take an example of Shopify, one of the e-commerce hosting providers that has achieved benefits with the efficacy of DevOps. Shopify supports different kinds of merchants and it is a known fact that it is a bit delicate to be in contact with each and every merchant. In order to solve this issue, Shopify adopted DevOps in late 2015. Consequently, they experienced an amazing positive result, within a year, by late 2016. Salesforce DevOps approach helps an organization to ensure close cooperation among its team members, which, eventually leads to higher productivity and performance.
4. Enhancing Customer Experience & Satisfaction
The ultimate goal of Salesforce DevOps is to enhance productivity and deliver software in the least possible time. This involves possessing the agility and flexibility to handle a high volume of changes with ease. Customers expect and demand the best possible experience for each and every digital medium offered for sale to them. Meeting that demand is always a big challenge for e-commerce businesses and software development firms, but Salesforce DevOps helps them meet those challenges easily. The swifter your organization can get new software into the marketplace, provide upgrades, and fix any glitches, the more your customers will use and recommend your products. So, the customer experience and satisfaction will be extremely high with the use of Salesforce DevOps.
5. Flexibility, Adaptability & Agility in Business
The most beneficial result of adopting Salesforce DevOps in e-commerce is that your business will be far more flexible. With agile project management blended with transparency and continuous automation, every department has the data, skills, and tools they need to enhance their processes.
The ultimate objective for such a mindset is that the customer will benefit immensely from all those improvements and your adaptability. When your IT team observes that your checkout is not optimized, your marketing team can customize landing pages, while your social media team can help customers until the resolution of the checkout issue. Thus, with the flexibility offered by Salesforce DevOps, you can replace everything you use – from product descriptions to the imagery – within a jiffy. E-commerce will remain a ‘sought-after’ industry that allows organizations to join the playing field, but success requires a more futuristic mindset and greater business flexibility.
Another vital quality that sets Salesforce DevOps apart from other models is its agility. To put it in simple words, it enables you to always retreat to any part of your project to enhance any of its stages and then deliver better results for your end consumer.
For instance, your Salesforce DevOps teams can continuously monitor and test the checkout process, find technical glitches, report, and go back to make amendments without any disruption to the entire site. Since DevOps is a complex solution to implement, numerous e-commerce companies are turning to DevOps as a Service (provide link to our DaaS service page here) to make the transition more seamless and rely on professionals who understand the complete process. In such controlled environments and under the watchful eye of your IT professionals, you can be assured that the agility of your DevOps will help your entire e-commerce staff to deliver extraordinary customer experience by resolving problems and even avoiding them through continuous monitoring and testing.
Salesforce DevOps provides not just this but much more, and it is gradually becoming the best solution for several e-commerce companies in the industry. Probably, it is time for your e-commerce business to consider Salesforce DevOps in your own model.
Conclusion
The Salesforce DevOps approach, which blends continuous innovation, smart automation processes, collaboration and cooperation, and flexibility and adaptability, empowers organizations to achieve its objectives and make the most out of the dynamic online business landscape. Moreover, it is crystal-clear that Salesforce DevOps can play a significant role in the e-commerce industry because it is one of the fastest-growing industries that is required to keep its customers up-to-date. Salesforce DevOps methodology is helping e-commerce development companies in several ways to keep its customers and vendors happy with the help of its agile method.
About CloudFulcrum
With its mission of ‘DevOps as a Service,’ CloudFulcrum has been a part of multiple successful Salesforce implementations worldwide with delighted customers in BFSI, Healthcare, Retail, Real Estate, and Technology verticals.
With our DevOps consulting, we help enterprises align their Digital Transformation goals to achieve higher efficiency, faster time-to-market, and better quality of software builds with early identification of arising issues, enabling continuous release of Salesforce applications.
