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AWS - How It Affects Online Selling Of The Present And Future

Home > Study Notes > AWS - How It Affects Online Selling Of The Present And Future
Published in: Business Strategy
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As business becoming more intensely crowded ..an online selling site must stand out..to be faster. Speed is critical to retain the attention of customers/clients. And there is a new service offered by Amazon Web Service that needs to be looked into by any serious IT-personnel.

Loke H / Kuala Lumpur

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Qualification: Chartered Institute of Management Accountants

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  1. Section 1: Zalora - Company Background, Products, and Services Zalora started out with a business vision combined with the corporate mission to become a leading e-commerce business. Founded in 2012 in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand and Vietnam. Also operates in New Zealand and Australia under the name of THE ICONIC. Since its starting up of business the Zalora Group has raised successfully USD 238 million in four rounds of funding from eight investors. Including in the investor listing are JP Morgan, Tengelmann and Venture Capital firms such as Kinnevik, Access Industries, Summit Partners and well Rocket Internet itself. (Tech in Asia, 2015) The historical mission and business planning of Zalora is centered on the marketing factor that the internet penetration in large part of the Asian Region during 2012 is still low and infrastructure hiccup s continue to be removed progressively thus opening internet access to a huge population of their targeted customers who will become users of the internet increasingly and in an exponential trajectory trend. Zalora also planned its mission looking at the increasing disposal income and easy access to technology and infrastructure in this Region of Asia and to turn this population into Zalora's online shoppers and loyal customers and clients. (Source of info: https://www.techinasia.com/fashion-ecommerce-zalora-turns-three ) Zalora started out as an online shopping site but since 2013 Zalora started to try out developing its own brand firstly under the name EZRA followed by launching its own ZALORA Brand in 2014. The strategy for own brand ownership is to become the owner of the entire supply chain which can escalate its response time and marketing /delivery actions to their customers to harness customer's satisfaction and cutting down disappointment in late response time and action to customer's online orders. The driver of Zalora's mission is to cater to the fashion market which is estimated at 600 million people in South East Asia and Australia /New Zealand with an estimated market size valued at USD 63.5 billion as reveal in a 2014 Report.
  2. Online Fashion Stores Zalora was born out of the Rocket Internet family and is headquartered in Singapore. The business model is to sell online employing e-commerce business model to offer out of the ordinary and fulfilling - great shopping experience for both men and women to be able within the comfort of a touch of their finger with internet accessibility to browse and consider purchasing vast range of merchandize of thousands of products from fashion apparel and clothings, shoes, accessories and beauty categories.Many more products are planned to be continuously added to the ever-growing range of products offering for the shopping demand and emotional buying spree of both men and women. And Zalora's marketing gimmicks and edge is to offer iron-clad guarantee to appeal to online shoppers and purchasers /visitors in order to promote a culture of great shopping with safety guarantee in place. This creates the safe online shopping comfort zone which ranges from thirty-day free returns policy, speedy deliveries within one to three days, free delivery on special cases and events or promotionary campaigns and coupled with easy multiple payments gateways and mode of payment including cash -on -delivery (COD). Zalora operates a well-designed e-commerce shopping site that features highly intuitive operating environment and easy navigation for visitors coming in to take a look at their offering of shopping products. Upon coming into Zalora website visitors are instantly guided through easy-to-understand and operate Step-by-Step e-commerce shopping procedure to complete whatever purchases quickly and easily without losing their way in the purchasing process. That is their cutting edge in marketing and selling model; easy and fun-filled with safety net of shopping. Knowing in advance that the trend of selling of shoes and clothing will always vary for many reasons ranging from a shoe that might not fit well to clothing that shopper regret their choices and wish to change. All these are factored in by Zalora Shopping Experience to accept good and products can be returned within thirty days of delivery. No question asked. This promotes customer's loyalty and trust.
  3. Zalora also makes customers servicing their top priority with comprehensive and personal service. Customers and clients can use the customer services hotline or live- chat on the topic of footwear and fashion and also to ask and seek clarification to Zalora team of expert customer support team. Zalora prides itself with superior and vast range of services make available to customers both personal and professional combined with speedy responsiveness to demand and needs of their customers and clients. Product Range Zalora represents big brand names the likes of Nike, American Apparel, New Look, River Island and many many more top brands coming on-stream continuously. (Tech in Asia, 2015) (Zalora, 2018)
  4. Section 2: The Needs ofusing AWS Cloud ZALORA started operations by running its content management systems, applications, websites and payment gateways, and the servers, storage, networks and associated infrastructure to support them, in a hosted data center. However, in 2013, the business launched its own brands. Combined with a loyal, growing customer base and massive growth, ZALORA experienced a surge in demand. The business could not scale its existing hosted infrastructure to support this growth without considerable additional investment. The old infrastructure could not support peak demand without requiring investment in capacity that would remain unutilized for most of the year, while new servers could take weeks to procure and slow the process of adding new features and functions to the company's products. The business started exploring more cost-effective infrastructure options that could also scale to support its longer-term expansion options. Zalora needs to expand its capacity to cater to its customers on-demand without compromising on its service quality and customer service response speed but the problem is that the loading on the computing power is erratic and move with peaks and normal slow usage. In order to have the speedy response without wasting expensive investment into conventional upgrading of computing capacity within the computer traditional mode the company must search for a suitable replacement module of computing platform to host its e-commerce online shopping with scalability capability with ease and at the same time without wastage in under-utilization of computing capacity in order to enhance return on company's return on its investment money. Zalora finally overcome its initial mistrust of Amazon Web Services and come to embrace AWS in March 2016.
  5. ZALORA's technology team initially had reservations about migrating its websites, applications, and associated systems to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. "It looked interesting, but we didn't know if we could trust its availability," says Karthik Subramaniam, Chief Technology Officer, ZALORA. By January 2013, ZALORA had seen enough of FoodPanda's, a sister company, success with AWS to experiment with its own small footprint in the cloud. ZALORA's experience prompted its technology team to steadily expand its AWS cloud deployment. In November 2014, further validation came from ZALORA's sister company in Australia and New Zealand, The ICONIC, who migrated their customer-facing systems to AWS over a weekend. In mid-2015, ZALORA launched its new Taiwan site directly into the cloud service. Therefore, the management finally embarked on full migration of its e-commerce content management by using Amazon Web Services. And by Mar 2016, ZALORA's servers in the data-centre were completely shut off and all systems were migrated to the AWS Cloud. ZALORA has achieved a range of benefits from running its entire infrastructure in the AWS cloud. Even managers with no IT expertise have understood the impact that AWS has had on the business. "Non-technical management see the benefits when business goals are met faster, or we can release features more quickly. "The AWS self-help culture aligns beautifully with the way our technology team work. We received help from AWS extremely quickly when it's needed," says Karthik. ZALORA managed to minimize its investment in technical personnel and resources with the help of AWS. Of its 1 ,500 employees, less than 150 are engineers. The ability to provision virtual instances in minutes helps enable the business to regularly add new features to its websites. Karthik estimates the process of bringing new products to market is up to three times faster with AWS than in its previous hosted data center
  6. environment. ZALORA is now well-equipped to scale to sustain growth that has seen it support up to 30 million unique users per month and became one of the region's most valuable web properties. (Amazon Web Services, 2018) Section 3: AWS Features/Modules/Systems in the Company The business is running its websites using core AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to provide resizable virtual compute resources. ZALORA uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store static assets, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to deliver a highly scalable primary database for all staging and some production systems. The business implemented a custom snowflake schema on Amazon RDS, linked it to well-known E TL tools, and used it to drive core business reporting across all functions. ZALORA also uses Amazon Redshift as a Data Warehouse for retail reporting, merchandise planning, and monitoring of retail KPls. And the business uses Amazon CloudWatch to monitor and manage its AWS infrastructure, while the process of creating and managing AWS resources is largely automated with AWS CloudFormation. (Amazon Web Services, 2018)
  7. Section 4: Proposed that the company compete to take the leadership role in online shopping experience using AWS new feature of AR (Augmented Reality) add-on usage in Zalora Online Shopping V Amazon today is introducing a new feature called AR View that lets customers visualize online products in their own living space, using their smartphone camera. Launched today in the Amazon app for iOS devices, AR View offers the ability to view thousands of products for the home or office — including furniture, electronics, toys, games, home décor and more — in augmented reality. The retailer before has dabbled with using AR technology in its app, but only in the form of AR stickers. These "shoppable stickers" were not that useful, as they represented a limited product set and were designed in an almost cartoonish way with big white borders that made them seem more like real stickers. But many other retailers have pressed forward with AR implementations, especially for shopping furniture — something it's hard to buy online, as it's difficult to imagine if the item will really look right in your home. Often, people have preferred to shop furniture in retailers' showrooms where they can see it placed inside finished rooms, and alongside other decorative items like lamps and rugs. Augmented reality has the potential to change that behavior, as it allows consumers to imagine items not just in a finished room, but in their own room. A number of retailers have recently added AR shopping features to their websites and apps, including Target, Wayfair, and IKEA.
  8. Proposed strategic management to look aggressively into AR features which will be very ideal to try out fashion and shoes and clothings in a Virtual Reality in Zalora shopping site. Trending of AR for Fashion Online e-commerce suitable for Zalora This is the ongoing new development by AWS for Fashion Online Selling Industry For example: Have you ever fretted over buying a suit or dress online for a wedding or another flashy event, wondering how it would look on your frame or if it would even fit? That might not be a problem soon now that Amazon has patented a blended-reality mirror that lets you try on clothes virtually while placing you into a virtual location The patent describes the mirror as partially-reflective and partially-transmissive, and uses a mix of displays, cameras, and projectors to create the blended image. The imagined mirror works by scanning the environment to generate a virtual model, and then identifies the face and eyes of the user to determine which objects are to be seen as a reflection. Once this process is completed, the virtual clothes and scene are transmitted through the mirror to create the blended-reality result. Not all patented ideas turn into products, of course. But Amazon acquired Body Labs last year, an Al-software and computer vision company that once touted its ability to create 3D models of human bodies in motion and then dress them in virtual outfits. You can also draw a line of progression between the blended-reality mirror and Amazon's Echo Look, a hands-free video camera that takes floor-length photos of you to provide style advice and fashion recommendations. Amazon has increasingly eyed a place in the fashion industry, ambitiously building up businesses in the sector, including launching its own clothing lines and developing algorithms that design clothing based on Instagram fashion trends. All considered, an
  9. Amazon-branded mirror that helps you get dressed isn't as bizarre as it might have once seemed.
  10. Section 5: Reference and Appendix Reference (Tech in Asia, 2015) Nadine Freischlad. (2015). Lessons from ecommerce giant Zalora on its third birthday. Tech in Asia. [online] Available at: http://www.techinasia.com/fashion-ecommerce-zalora-turns-three [Accessed 22 Jun. 2018]. (Zalora, 2018) Zalora. (2018). About Us. Zalora. [online] Available at: http://www.zalora.com.my/about [Accessed 22 Jun. 2018]. (Tech Crunch, 2018) Sarah Perez. (2018). Amazon adds an AR shopping feature to its iOS app. Tech Crunch. [online] Available at: http://www.techcrunch.com/2017/11/01 /amazon-adds-an-ar-shopping-feature-to-its- ios-app [Accessed 22 Jun. 2018]. (Amazon, 2017) Amazon. (2017). Introducing AR view. Amazon. [online] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11 &v=uhdOzpblrm0 [Accessed 22 Jun. 2018]. (The verge, 2018) Thuy Ong. (2018). Amazon patents a mirror that dresses you in virtual clothes. The Verge. [online] Available at: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/1/3/16844300/amazon-patent- mirror-virtual-clothes-fashion [Accessed 22 Jun. 2018]. (Wikipedia, 2018) Wikipedia. (2018). Rocket Internet. Wikipedia. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_lnternet [Accessed 22 Jun. 2018]. (Wikipedia, 2018) Wikipedia. (2018). Business-IT alignment. Wikipedia. [online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business-lT_alignment [Accessed 22 Jun. 2018]. (European Parliamentary Research Service Blog, 2018) Ron Davies. (2018). Cloud computing: An overview of economic and policy issues. European Parliamentary Research Service Blog. [online] Available at: https ://epthinktank. eu/201 6/05/27/clo ud-co m puting -an-overview-of-eco nom ic-and-policy-issu es/ [Accessed 22 Jun. 2018]. (Amazon Web Services, 2018) Amazon Web Services. (2018). AWS Case Study: ZALORA. Amazon Web Services. [online] Available at: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/zalora/ [Accessed 22 Jun. 2018]. (Amazon Web Services, 2018)
  11. Amazon Web Services. (2018). What is Cloud Computing?. Amazon Web Services. [online] Available at: https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing/ [Accessed 22 Jun. 2018].
  12. • Evidence of online blended work 1) What is Cloud Computing? Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of compute power, database storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Cloud Computing Basics Whether you are running applications that share photos to millions of mobile users or you're supporting the critical operations of your business, a cloud services platform provides rapid access to flexible and low cost IT resources. With cloud computing, you don't need to make large upfront investments in hardware and spend a lot of time on the heavy lifting of managing that hardware. Instead, you can provision exactly the right type and size of computing resources you need to power your newest bright idea or operate your IT department. You can access as many resources as you need, almost instantly, and only pay for what you use. Cloud computing provides a simple way to access servers, storage, databases and a broad set of application services over the Internet. A Cloud services platform such as Amazon Web Services owns and maintains the network- connected hardware required for these application services, while you provision and use what you need via a web application. (Amazon Web Services, 2018) 2) Categorization of IT support in company (how IT support is used in various department) Business-IT alignment is a dynamic state in which a business orqanization is able to use information technoloqy (IT) to achieve business objectives - typically improved financial performance or marketplace competitiveness. Some definitions focus more on outcomes (the ability of IT to produce business value)
  13. than means (the harmony between IT and business decision-makers within the organizations This alignment is in contrast to what is often experienced in organizations: IT and business professionals unable to bridge the gap between themselves because of differences in objectives, culture, and incentives and a mutual ignorance for the other group's body of knowledge. This rift generally results in expensive IT systems that do not provide adequate return on investment. For this reason, the search for business-IT alignment is closely associated with attempts to improve the business value of IT investments. Business-IT alignment integrates the information technology to the strategy, mission, and goals of the organization. Key characteristics in order to achieve this alignment are: 1. 2. 3. 4. The organization must view information technology as an instrument to transform the business. This includes exploring other revenue streams and integrating other facets of their business into each other. For example, using one central data warehouse to combine two separate, but partnering businesses. An organization must hold customer service, both externally and internally, at the utmost importance. Communication between the organization and their customers must not be lost. An organization must rotate both IT and business professionals across different departments and job functions. They must have the knowledge and experience of both sides of the business so that understanding and communication is achieved. Once those three characteristics are achieved, An organization must provide clear and specific goals to both the IT and business employees. This will create the integration of both entities to achieve a common goal. (Wikipedia, 2018)
  14. Ensure that IT and business employees understand how the company 5. makes or loses money. This is important so that money is not carelessly poured into the IT department and there is no return on that investment. Organizations must create a vibrant and inclusive company culture. There 6. must not only be informational unity, but a company as whole. 3) The study on ethical issues raised by Cloud Computing support Legal: As is often the case with new technologies, the concept of storing legal data in the cloud battled its share of skeptics before it gained wide acceptance from vendors and law firms alike. Cloud computing uses shared computing environments and relies on the public internet for transmitting information, it raises concerns about security and personal data protection. Also, the lack of interoperability between cloud service products and the absence of standards that would facilitate data portability may make it difficult for customers to switch vendors. Fixed or obscure contract terms that limit liability or service guarantees may also restrict customers' rights. (European Parliamentary Research Service Blog, 2018)
  15. Citation Examples The basics of a Reference List entry for a Web page or Web document: Author or authors. The surname is followed by first initials. Year. Title (in italics). Date viewed. Web address . Example: Cancer Council 2017, Causes of cancer, Cancer Council, viewed 21 May 2018, . Author Tide Publisher Date Viewed I-JRC Cancer Council 2017, Causes ofcancer, Cancer Councili viewed 21 May 201 Bf . Include author(s) name(s) for internet/website references where possible (an author may be a corporate body or organisation responsible for creating, producing or publishing a webpage or website. Where there is no identifiable author or authoring body, use the title of the webpage or website The year is the time of the last update of the web page or document.
  16. In text Cite the name of the author/ organization responsible for the site and the date created or last revised): (International Narcotics Control Board 1999) List of references International Narcotics Control Board 1999, United Nations, accessed 1 October 1999, Include the following information: author (the person or organisation responsible for the site) year (date created or last updated) name of sponsor of site (if available) accessed day month year (the date you viewed the site) URL or Internet address (between pointed brackets). If possible, ensure that the URL is included without a line-break.
  17. Use the following template to cite a website using the Harvard citation style. For help with other source types, like books, PDFs, or websites, check out our other guides. To have your reference list or bibliography automatically made for you, try our free citation generator. Key : Pink text Black text information that you will need to find from the source. text required by the Harvard style. Reference list Place this part in your bibliography or reference list at the end of your assignment. Template: Author Surname, Author at: http://Website URL Example: Initial. ( Yea [Accessed Date Published) . Accessed Ti t 1 e. [online] Available Tester, J. (2014) . EZproxy. [online] Eds.a.ebscohost.com. ezproxy. liv. ac.uk. Available at: http : / / eds . a . ebscohost . com. ezproxy . I i v. ac . uk/eds/detail 4dd7-a8bc 0 f2d5 915 a 3 7 4 0 s es s ionmg r 4 0 05 & vid=4 &bda ta=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcG U9c210ZQ%3d%3d#db=bth&AN=67324416 [Accessed 21 Jun. 2014 In-text citation Place this part right after the quote or reference to the source in your assignment. Template (Author Surname, Example Year Published) income statement has several indicators (canaries) that will telegraph early warning signs well before the company starts to lose money or the bank balance starts to drop precariously low. (Tester, 2014)
  18. Websites In text Cite the name of the author/ organisation responsible for the site and the date created or last revised): (International Narcotics Control Board 1999) List of references International Narcotics Control Board 1999, United Nations, accessed 1 October 1999, Include the following information: author (the person or organisation responsible for the site) year (date created or last updated) name of sponsor of site (if available) accessed day month year (the date you viewed the site) URL or Internet address (between pointed brackets). If possible, ensure that the URL is included without a line-break.
  19. Media releases To cite a media release In text In the text, cite the author (the person responsible for the release) and date: Prime Minister Howard (2007) announced plans for further welfare reform... List of references Include the following information: author name or authoring organisation name date title of release (in italics) format accessed day month year URL (between pointed brackets) Office of the Prime Minister 2007, Welfare Payments Reform, media release, accessed 25 July 2007, .

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