Business Continuity Plan is Must for E-commerce

IT Infrastructure plays a vital role in an e-commerce industry as almost all the business is fetched through purchases from the site. It is extremely important for the IT sector to focus on the implementation of work structure in a format where the business in not hampered at all. In an exclusive chat with Dheer Singh, Senior Manager, Technology, YEPME, Bhawna Satsangi find out the need of IT infrastructure and the challenges faced by the IT for running an e-commerce business.

How important is the IT infrastructure for YEPME?

YEPME is an e-commerce company and for E-commerce companies, IT infrastructure is a part of bread and butter because normally an e-Commerce company do not have outlet. Everything that they sell, they sell about themselves. So IT infrastructure is really very important for an e-Commerce company and YEPME is one of the few e-commerce companies in India who are profitable because there are lot of companies today who are e-commerce but at the end they are not making profits, may be they have big presence but you don’t know what is the game plan, why people are operating it with low margins.

An e-commerce company needs necessarily a business continuity plan because company like us who does most of the business through social media like facebook, we do most of our promotions on facebook and almost 50 percent of business is coming from facebook. Now it is an area where people are present round the clock and the purchases are on, so that’s why it is important that an e-commerce company should be up and learning 24×7 and that infrastructure which they are catering that must adhere to their requirement in such a way that it gives you complete availability and infrastructure should be such which can sustain lot of traffic so that users experience cannot rule out. IT infrastructure point of view it is very important to have a good set up and that is why we are hosted on two data centers. We have very good low balance set up and a data base set up such a type that will never go down.

What are the biggest areas of focus as far as IT implementation is concerned?

The first focus area is speed of customer add. If you are not getting a particular amount of time, user is not bound to search. If your page is not rendering in six seconds then there is very less chance that he wants to engage with you any longer. The industry standards says that three seconds is a very good time but normally by Indian standards if you go, people tend to be on website if they get back response in six seconds. When the response is going beyond six seconds then people are not very engaged into the site and may lose interest and leave the site.

The next focus area is pricing. In e-commerce site pricing and quality is very important so whatever propositions we are selling we are giving the best prices as compared to the market. If I am selling a Rs.499 shoe and a similar shoe is available in the market, my aim is that it cannot be obtained at Rs.799 in the market so I am giving a good proposition of the value. Timely delivery and after sales services support is another area of concern that has to be taken care. So basically we are catering to the four areas first is the speed, promise quality and price, delivery and after delivery customer services.

What kind of challenges do you find while implementing typical IT systems for YEPME? How did you overcome these challenges?

If you are running a 24×7 site then you are setting up data base memory then there are many challenges. First challenge is that you have to do a new set up without disrupting the production environment so you can’t take down the site for long. For this we have launched a plan for the middle of night at 3 ‘o’ clock when the traffic is very low or we are doing requirements in such a way that we don’t have keep the sites down. This strategy has become very important that whatever means we are pushing into the system it has been aligned in such a way that without taking the down website we should do the work.

As an IT manager what is your success mantra?

Though we do lot of bid, in last one year I have done more than 300. It is almost about one per working day. Everything cannot be a task of development in infrastructure set up there are some things that you have to rely on some partners also for best performance of your website like if you are running an e-commerce website how better you can use the content delivery network and how better you set is very important. This has to be done in an optimized manner. The success mantra is we make scalable solutions, back office operations also counts in the success, how competent is the young resources so these are some of the important things