Today’s retail environment is more competitive than ever. Consumers and B2B customers alike now expect the ability to browse, compare and buy on any mixture of digital channels, and will quickly abandon their purchases if retailers are unable to offer frictionless journeys.
Early in 2020, the situation for retailers became more complex still. Many enterprises that relied heavily on bricks-and-mortar locations to engage with their customers had to pivot quickly to online and mobile experiences to survive and thrive in a new era of social distancing and local lockdowns.
RETISIO aims to empower retailers to solve these challenges, and deliver smooth, high-quality customer experiences that help lift conversation rates, drive sales, and cultivate long-term loyalty.
Sudhanshu Mohan, CEO at RETISIO, takes up the story, “We work with some of the most recognizable brands in North America, and specialize in designing and delivering e-commerce solutions that enable established enterprises to compete effectively with even the largest born-online retailers.”
As well as lacking the customer experience and analytics tools necessary to compete with the largest online-only retailers, many off-the-shelf platforms required significant manual management and maintenance—increasing hosting and IT costs. RETISIO was founded to fill the gap in the market for a next-generation e-commerce platform.
To enable fast and agile development of new capabilities—as well as greater front-end flexibility—the optimal e-commerce platform would be built according to reactive principles. It would be able to ingest streaming data and apply real-time AI and machine learning to deliver hyper-personalized experiences that incentivize conversion. And with a cloud-native approach, RETISIO could maximize availability for its clients while minimizing the need for maintenance, helping to deliver lean and cost-efficient services for retailers in the cloud.
RETISIO set out to create ARC: a scalable, responsive, resilient, self-healing and commerce platform powered by cutting-edge AI and machine-learning technology.
In determining the functionality of the ARC solution, RETISIO focused on designing rich features to give all retailers the power to compete with competitors of any size.
By selecting the Akka Platform by Lightbend as the foundation for ARC, RETISIO gained the ability to rapidly and cost-efficiently build, test, deploy and monitor microservices at scale. RETISIO also uses Akka Data Pipelines (built on the Akka Platform) – a framework for developing, building, deploying, and managing streaming data pipelines. These pipelines feed the machine-learning models with real-time customer browsing activity and information on historical purchases.
“Akka Platform from Lightbend is a key enabler for the ARC commerce solution—without it, we simply would not be able to deliver the lightning-fast performance we need to provide highly personalized e-commerce experiences at enterprise scale to the retail sector,” explains Sudhanshu Mohan.
If they choose also to subscribe to the Akka Platform, organizations can benefit from vendor support and sophisticated telemetry to monitor the performance and resilience of their ARC solution. All ARC customers gain the benefits of the self-healing capabilities of Akka, which typically ensures zero impact on users if a retailer’s website encounters technical issues.
RETISIO recently migrated a very large U.S. retail client to the ARC solution. The client worked with AIEnterprise—a Texas-based specialist consultancy and systems integrator for the retail industry—to rapidly achieve a successful rollout of the solution.
“We slashed average page-loading times from around eight seconds to just two seconds, a four-fold improvement,” says a spokesperson for the large retailer. “We have also achieved a significant uptick in conversion rates and dwell times. For example, over Black Friday and Cyber Monday we measured a 63% increase in conversion rates—driving increased revenues.”
Thanks to the performance and efficiency of the Akka Platform underpinning ARC, the company was able to shrink its cloud infrastructure costs by 40%, helping to protect retail margins during the unprecedented economic disruption of 2020.
The cloud-native, microservices-based Akka Platform environment supports full DevOps capabilities that make it easier and faster to bring new features into production. The solution also enables the retailer to manage complex promotions more easily and take advantage of more advanced merchandising tools. Meanwhile, customers benefit from improved search capabilities and a checkout process that is typically twice as fast as before.
“By working with Lightbend technology to build our next-generation e-commerce solution, we can offer our retail clients the capabilities they need to delight their customers,” concludes Sudhanshu Mohan.
Headquartered in Lewes, Delaware, RETISIO Inc. is a pathfinder in the eCommerce space, focused on providing retail products and platforms that are future-ready. RETISIO provides retailers with cutting-edge platforms that reinvigorate their business and help them stay ahead of the competition.
