Putting merchandising aside, the success of an eCommerce store has typically hinged on a handful of factors: site speed, convenience, and delivering a great user experience. The advent of cloud computing enabled us to make great strides towards these ambitions. And now artificial intelligence (AI) is once again reshaping how online businesses build, scale, and deliver shopping experiences. Put them together, and the combination of AI-powered tools with the flexibility of the cloud means eCommerce reinvention is accelerating at a scale difficult to imagine. For many digital business owners, it’s been a forcing factor to reevaluate whether they have the right infrastructure foundations in place to support experimentation and growth.
Cloudways was built with a similar spirit in mind: bringing together the best of cloud technologies with the simplicity and flexibility of a fully managed service to help online businesses innovate and scale web applications efficiently. Built on top of major cloud infrastructure providers, we simplified the process of provisioning the core components of infrastructure (i.e. compute, networking, storage) through a fully managed platform that handles server management, security setup, performance optimization, and backups among other services. An additional intelligence layer recently introduced means our users can monitor and troubleshoot complex environments with AI-guided support and remediation without requiring deep infrastructure expertise.
Our users appreciate the balance we provide between allowing for control while also providing hands-off autonomy, making the platform popular with developers, agencies, and eCommerce brands. But beyond providing infrastructure management at scale, the broader story for Cloudways is how we’re thinking about what comes next. How do we enable our customers to continue to redefine what a modern eCommerce store is capable of delivering?
Performance as Baseline Entry
For eCommerce, performance alone is no longer a competitive advantage. It’s the baseline requirement for entry.
To deliver a seamless user journey—from browsing to order completion—performance is just one part of a highly orchestrated approach required for online selling. Consumers don’t want to wait. Page load times, fast image downloads, frictionless checkout, and a quick payment processing module that’s frictionless, leads to engaged browsers who have a higher likelihood of completing a transaction.
So what should the ideal experience entail? Before you can even start composing the key features of the shopping experience, you first have to consider the Two Second Rule. This is the difference of what happens when your website is not optimized for speed. According to a Google study, half of website users will abandon a mobile site if it takes more than three seconds to load. How much of an impact does this have? Consider that websites that load in two seconds have an average bounce rate of just 9 percent, while those that take five seconds to load see a bounce rate that skyrockets to 38 percent.
This is where cloud really is a hero. The proliferation of cloud infrastructure providers, data center availability zones, PoP locations, edge caching capabilities delivered through CDNs, and cutting edge compute technologies have collectively done amazing things for internet services. Entire ecosystems have been built from the ground-up by enterprising, cloud-native entrepreneurs that continue to service the evolving needs of online shoppers. In our business, when we think about performance, a lot of how we address our customer’s needs is by providing choice, flexibility, and reliability. The option to deploy apps to your cloud provider of choice (we offer 5; DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, GCP, & AWS), built-in autoscaling capability for big and busy eCommerce stores, and building a blazing-fast tech stack for our managed platform, are simply some of the ways we prioritize performance delivery for dynamic, modern web applications.
Changing the game with AI
And then along came mainstream AI. For those of us deeply involved in tech, this was hardly a new phenomena, after years of being exposed to machine learning and curated algorithms. Commerce giants like Amazon pioneered the recommendation engine off the back of large language models (LLM), using learnings from our consumer behaviours to make AI-powered use cases mainstream across everything from personalization and search, to inventory management and customer support.
What’s changed is the speed of AI adoption. What used to take weeks and months to build into foundational LLM models is now possible in a matter of hours thanks to the accessibility of tools. The shift we’re seeing due to the rise of no-code and low-code platforms being readily available means that anyone can build augmentation tools to automate and innovate across eCommerce services. Not only has the tooling become better, more accurate, and easily deployable, but with the benefit of fast, scalable, and reliable cloud hosting at its core, accessing real-time data for personalization and the mechanics that enable secure transactions have become much more sophisticated.
We’re seeing this in a number of eCommerce use cases critical to how services are delivered. Payments processing capability is a cornerstone of successful online commerce—not just from the perspective of charging funds, but also in how we innovate the collection process to include alternate methods demanded by consumers like digital wallets or mobile payments. Fraud protection and abuse management are an inherent part of any merchant’s risk assessment. Thanks to AI-powered capabilities we can now train models to detect and mitigate complex fraud patterns where dozens of behavioural signals (i.e. billing and shipping mismatch, IP abuse, stolen credit card blocking, account phishing, etc.) are analyzed in milliseconds to determine transaction legitimacy.
One of the biggest profit drains for online retail where AI-powered models can help support online transactions—especially in sectors like apparel, is the perennial issue of returns and profitability. We’re seeing clothing and accessory retailers increasingly using virtual dressing rooms and virtual try-ons to match stock-keeping units to body fit, sizing preferences, and make product recommendations. When clothing fits better or you can project an image of yourself with the fit, the return rate is likely to drop, increasing both margins as well as customer satisfaction. To make this work, businesses need cloud hosting that can handle high traffic, demand, and support integrations with complex AI tooling.
The other impact AI is having on eCommerce is with dynamic pricing. Over the years, from airlines to companies like Ticketmaster, demand-based pricing has become more and more normalized. But with AI, dynamic pricing can go even further. Imagine that there is an algorithm that can identify a shopper’s intent level just based on their behavior. This could be based on factors like pages they have viewed, time spent on the site, product comparison, or past carts they have abandoned. Using these factors, you could then open up the customer to just-in-time pricing, offering the right incentive at the right time to the right person. Doing this also eliminates the need to rely on blanket discounts while further personalizing the user’s eCommerce experience.
How businesses can adapt
The thought of transforming your business with AI can be a daunting endeavour given how quickly the technology shifts and constantly improves. Same goes for knowing where to start and that’s OK. Sometimes making small, incremental changes by picking a single focus area can be equally as effective. The tools out there today are so sophisticated that something like building and deploying a store companion bot to help online shoppers with product questions may seem complex on the surface, but are actually much easier to build, deploy, and train with the right toolset and a flexible managed cloud platform to experiment without breaking the bank.
Ultimately, it’s worth remembering that the key staples of a modern eCommerce operation aren’t dramatically different; establishing a secure, scalable foundation that optimizes for both speed and performance. It’s easy for a growing business to get bogged down by complex infrastructure, leading to sluggish customer experiences and lost sales. Integrating AI-powered experiences into your store, can help you keep pace with innovating the user experience to drive better business outcomes and confidently adapt to delivering the dynamic, frictionless shopping experiences today’s consumers expect
About Fatih Mehtap
Fatih Mehtap is a seasoned marketing leader, tech enthusiast, consultant, and entrepreneur with over two decades of experience across global enterprises and high-growth scale-ups. Over the course of his career, he has worked with leading organizations such as Oracle, Dell, and Amazon. He currently serves as VP Marketing at Cloudways by DigitalOcean, the managed hosting division, where he leads marketing and go-to-market strategy for the company.
