The growth in today’s online retail market in China remains staggering, driven by rapid increases in the total number of online buyers and online spending per buyer. Web-only retailers dominate this market, but the dynamic is starting to shift as an increasing number of traditional retailers embrace eCommerce, including local companies and multinational corporations. eCommerce companies are at the forefront of technology adoption to better support business. However, I&O professionals face several challenges:

  • Storage capacity, data sharing, and server efficiency cannot keep up with business growth. 
  • Online traffic peaks overload infrastructure, leading to poor client experiences.
  • Social media information overloads traditional analytics. 

I&O pros wonder whether they’re keeping pace with their peers in terms of IT infrastructure and future planning for eCommerce. My most recent report, “Case Study: Yihaodian Leverages IT Assets To Deliver Results In China’s eCommerce Market”, will help answer these questions and provide tips on optimizing IT infrastructure for eCommerce. Yihaodian has been doing very well in the Chinese market, and my report analyzes the key practices that it implemented to support its quickly growing business, including:

  • Creating a predictive IT model based on data analysis to link to business goals. Predictive models are core tools that I&O teams use to identify the present state of their IT infrastructure and plan for the coming year. I&O teams should engage business leaders to learn their requirements, base IT resource analyses on data from business leaders and third parties, and allocate 20% of their IT infrastructure as a standby resource to support business growth.
  • Implementing a converged infrastructure for registered-user data and online trading information. Converged infrastructure increases the capacity to extract, transform, and load data several times over. Yihaodian extracted more value from its data to inform business decisions and predict IT traffic volumes. Converged infrastructure became a key part of its big data platform, which includes a traditional x86 environment and a Hadoop platform.
  • Embedding an automatic price intelligence solution to improve competitive advantage. An automatic price intelligence solution can capture, store, and analyze price information from others eCommerce websites in real time. Yihaodan uses it to adjust the price of its products to stay competitive and its improve overall gross margin in the intensely competitive eCommerce market in China.

If you’d like more details on how Yihaodian applied these practices, please take a deep dive into my report. I hope you enjoy reading the report and welcome your comments on this blog post.