How Adobe Magento Commerce took one retailer from startup to success

Launching a product at scale is no easy task for online retailers. However, cloud eCommerce platforms like Adobe Magento Commerce are attempting to paint a different picture. With Magento Commerce, retailers can create a personalized, easy online shopping experience that handles large volumes of orders and customers. 

Magento is an eCommerce platform that enables merchants to sell online, especially those that are seeing rapid growth, said Peter Sheldon, senior director of strategy for Adobe’s commerce business.  

SEE: Special report: Data, AI, IoT: The future of retail (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

This type of platform is exactly what one smart tech business, Wyze, needed. Wyze Labs began with a simple idea: Create an affordable, high performing wireless camera. Once the Wyze Cam was produced and offered to the public, its Woo Commerce webshop couldn’t sustain the success brought by the product. 

Wyze had hoped, but didn’t expect, that the camera would be such a hit, said Anthony Potgieter, senior manager of development of Wyze. But it was, causing website traffic spikes of eight to 15  times the regular baseline. 

Potgieter said he and his colleagues at Wyze realized they needed a different eCommerce platform, one that could withstand a lot of traffic. 

“I needed something that could scale and be able to support this customer growth,” Potgieter said. “It’s the worst feeling in the world to know that you’re on the wrong system, or to see people be excited to buy a product and then not be able to.” 

“You see comments like, ‘You guys should hire a proper eCommerce team,'” Potgieter added. “It’s hard and you’re letting down people and all the product teams.” 

Turning to Adobe Magento Commerce 

If the site on the old system crashed, Potgieter would be the one waking up in the middle of the night to help fix it. 

 “There was no way we could be on call 24/7,” Potgieter said. “We needed that support, and that was something that we got through the cloud hosted solution. There’s a system of people monitoring aside that are not obviously Wyze, they’re at Adobe. That peace of mind alone has made my life a lot more sane.”

The support from Adobe Magento prevents downtime and errors since you have their separate team on-call all the time, he added. 

The client’s job is to sell the merchandise, while Magento comes in and handles the infrastructure, Sheldon said. 

Potgieter said the main reason they chose the cloud solution was because of the technology behind it, especially its ability to automatically scale its site to host normal traffic days and large traffic days. Additionally, the cost savings of hosting data in the cloud versus launching an AWS server was unparalleled, he added. 

While switching to Adobe Magento Commerce was a massive migration and took a lot of complex work, the results paid off, Potgieter said. 

With the new system, Wyze is able to complete 850 orders per minute, reach 50,000 customers per hour, and complete two-second page loads, according to Potgieter. 

Clearly switching to the cloud has brought Wyze success, and this success is especially important in the wake of the coronavirus, as online shopping is sure to skyrocket, Potgieter said. 

Potgieter warned small businesses that are completely dependent on third parties like Amazon. In times of crisis, these third parties may make independent business decisions that can directly affect small business. 

By working with a cloud platform like Adobe, but maintaining control of its own site, Potgieter emphasized how Wyze still maintains control of their own products, preventing other organizations from controlling their sales or visibility. 

For more, check out Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu AI make cloud services free during COVID-19 pandemic on TechRepublic. 

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