Johannesburg, 12 Apr 2023
Scalability and low latency are key advantages in an increasingly competitive e-commerce arena, where an inability to cope with traffic surges and as little as a few milliseconds of lag, can cost e-tailers customers and sales.
This is according to George Thomas, Director: Cloud Sales South Africa at Huawei, who says overcoming challenges such as latency, scalability, security and skills is crucial for both traditional retailers moving online, and born-in-the-cloud e-commerce start-ups.
Thomas says e-commerce has accelerated post-COVID, presenting significant business opportunities for both born-in-the-cloud start-ups and traditional retailers moving online.
E-commerce in Africa is expected to generate US$40.80 billion in revenues this year, with a 17% CAGR in online consumers and multi-billion dollar investments in business development. A study by World Wide Worx for Mastercard found that online retail growth in South Africa alone topped 30% last year, totalling R55 billion.
Despite this strong growth, the WEF has noted that e-commerce entrepreneurs are challenged by issues such as low consumer trust and e-skills, low internet penetration and affordability, uncompetitive delivery infrastructure, fragmented markets and barriers to cross-border e-payments.
Thomas says e-commerce businesses face myriad challenges in addition to these: “An e-commerce site is much more than a static site. Modern e-commerce businesses can’t just stream one-way communications – they need to enable two-way interactions, they must be dynamic and able to scale, and they must put themselves in a position to harness technologies such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality to stay competitive and relevant.”
Cost, infrastructure and skills are some of the limitations for those aiming to provide next-generation online shopping experiences, however. Latency, a key e-commerce differentiator, is a challenge for e-commerce businesses that have not architected their systems for speed. Milliseconds matter, he notes.
Overcoming hurdles with the right cloud, technology partner
Building on its foundation of connecting people, Huawei is addressing latency by taking data centres and content delivery nodes closer to consumers. Huawei Cloud has 78 availability zones around the world, with three specifically in South Africa, as well as a Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) with over 2,800 Points of Presence (PoPs) inside a variety of networks in more than 130 countries.
Thomas says e-commerce challenges, such as flexibility, cost and future-proofing, can be overcome by working with the right technology partner, which offers scalable infrastructure, transparent pricing and in-country support. The public cloud, in particular, offers three key advantages for e-commerce, he notes. The public cloud delivers the stability and scalability to handle sudden traffic surges, enhance security, overcome a poor user experience and support data analysis for forecasting and personalisation.
Huawei Cloud offers advantages such as scalability during peak loads, an agile and secure development environment and performance across national borders. Says Thomas: “Huawei Cloud has designed an end-to-end suite of solutions and services to make ourselves a one-stop shop for e-commerce business development. We offer advanced services taking customers from a static site through to a site that can support millions of customers, 3D search, animated characters and big data analytics for customer analysis and forecasting.”
Huawei conforms to international security and compliance best practices, and has invested heavily in security across seven layers.
In addition, Huawei offers local specialist technical support teams and a training and enablement platform to address customers’ skills challenges. “We provide fully funded training programmes with HCIE, HCIP and HCIA certifications to help e-commerce businesses move to the next level,” Thomas says.
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