Huawei Cloud technology helps SA ecommerce business become globally competitive

South African ecommerce businesses need to mature their systems and processes to withstand competition from an influx of global e-commerce giants, as well as expand their offerings and compete in new markets.

So, says Calvin Huang, ecommerce product and solution architect specialist at Huawei Cloud, who specialises in helping local ecommerce businesses identify areas for improvement and optimise both their systems and processes using Huawei Cloud solutions.

Huang says e-commerce businesses globally face common key challenges in optimising their opportunities: “An ongoing challenge is to improve the user experience and build customer loyalty and retention. E-commerce businesses are also striving to improve conversion rates in a competitive and saturated market.”

Standing in the way of these objectives are traditional, inflexible architecture that cannot cope with traffic surges, inadequate recommendation engines, and slow adoption of cutting-edge technologies such as AI, AR/VR, and big data analytics.

In South Africa, e-commerce businesses are also challenged by payment system infrastructure that cannot handle massive traffic surges, and the perceived costs involved in running systems in the cloud. E-commerce businesses are seeking transformation to support two-way interactions, they need to become dynamic and able to scale, and they must move to integrate technologies such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality for more immersive customer experiences.

To address their challenges and grow their businesses, e-commerce companies need to harness cloud native and specialised e-commerce technologies as part of their transformation strategies, Huang says.

“Huawei Cloud has deep sector-specific expertise and a portfolio of solutions designed to transform and grow e-commerce businesses,” he notes. Huawei Cloud is a secure, affordable and innovative international public cloud service provider, with ultra-large cloud data centres, networks, and services in South Africa.

“There are compelling business cases for incorporating Huawei Cloud into a hybrid cloud strategy – not least the fact that we have built our entire value chain across hardware and software, which means we can offer significantly lower prices,” he says. “Our in-country experts offer local support and skills development, helping South African e-commerce businesses transform and become more competitive.”

Huawei Cloud solutions for e-commerce include:

Huawei Cloud’s global cloud infrastructure designed for high availability, scalability and low latency, with 30 regions and 85 availability zones, as well as 13 CDN edge nodes in Africa and three availability zones and colocation infrastructure in South Africa. Huawei Cloud is transparently and highly competitively priced, and supported by in-country expertise.  Huawei also focuses on security, backed by more than 100 international compliance certifications and 24/7 support.

Huawei Cloud’s digital e-commerce solutions help businesses deploy services rapidly, at a lower cost. For promotions and campaigns, Huawei’s cloud native solution provides superb performance and smooth experience, with up to 3,000 pods provisioned within 1 minute and tens of millions of QPS and millisecond-level latency.

Huawei Cloud enhances access and content distribution speeds, reducing latency to 15 ms, improving dynamic content distribution by more than 30% and accelerating intelligent routing by more than 20%.

Huawei Cloud’s E-commerce Big Data solution provides foundational support for efficient user profiling and precision marketing, with a lower TCO. Big Data with AI helps e-commerce businesses offer hyper personalised recommendations at scale.

Huawei Cloud’s KooSearch intelligent search solution improves search accuracy using pre-trained models, in 32 languages covering over 170 countries and regions.

Huawei Cloud’s live streaming solution, Low Latency Live (LLL) offers HD and low bit rate, with a livestreaming success rate of greater than 99.9%, and bit rate is reduced by 50%. E2E latency is under 800 ms and the first frame latency is less than 400 ms.

Discover more on how to transform and optimise your e-commerce environment with Huawei Cloud solutions: https://www.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/solution/businesscloud/