Keeping Retail Sites Up 24x7x365

In a global economy there is no downtime. Even for national or local retailers, downtime has become a thing of the past. People buy at odd hours. Customers who have a bad experience have other options that are up 24×7. Search is the core of the Internet and even more so the core of how people buy things on the Internet.

24×7 Core Infrastructure

Despite this, many e-commerce platforms and even dedicated ecommerce earch solutions treat availability as an afterthought. One well-known search solution actually requires you to store everything and scale a NAS in order to achieve availability. Not only will that not scale, but it isn’t very dependable.

Lucidworks Fusion is built upon a Solr core architecture. This architecture is tried and true and is the same general idea that the Internet giants use to scale to great size while simultaneously maintaining what used to be uncommon uptime.

Meanwhile the world is becoming more volatile. Whether it is climate change making weather patterns more erratic, violence around the world, or just plain old fiber cuts, you need to make sure you can handle a data center or cloud “Availability Zone” going down. This is known by many names such as Disaster Recovery, WAN replication, and CDCR. The bottom line is you need to stay up, no matter what!

24x7x365 Analytics

Recently everyone is getting into the personalization and analytics/data science business. Supposedly you’re going to profile your customers, send that off to a team of data scientists who are going to load that into notebooks, and they’re going to send you back something actionable. There are a lot of crickets in that.

With Fusion Insights you can see this kind of customer profile information out of the box, in real-time, whenever you want. Combined with our advanced AI technology you can also automate most of what you’d do using this data out of the way. From promotions to recommendations, you can automatically find the user their exact desires.

And yes, if you want you can just grab the user events into plain old Excel (or your favorite analytics tool) or query it with plain old SQL.

24x7x365 Updates

Stuff is happening, inventory is being received. You need a system that doesn’t need to go down for batch updates. You need an architecture that can be updated in real-time. If you have other systems that operate in batch, you need to be able to share the load and get it done as soon as inhumanly possible. If not, you’re losing real money.

Fusion’s Solr architecture is architected like the Internet. It can take streams of data at real-time speeds and make it readily available for your customers. Meanwhile, Fusion’s ingestion architecture can take and transform data using distributed computing technology so that as many nodes as possible are involved in getting the work done. This means your data is updated and ready as fast as you need it to be.

24x7x365 Changes

Data Sources change, customers change, and therefore systems change. A modern retailer is tweaking their algorithms for product search relevance, customer personalization, and everything in-between. A modern e-commerce search solution needs to be open to change at any time.

Fusion’s Query Workbench lets your search developers see what they’re doing and test it. Fusion’s Index Workbench even lets you change the way you import data and see what those changes will mean before they are live. Fusion’s Experiments engine allows you to do real A-B testing, allowing you to see which version of a query or customer targeting method yields more sales.

24x7x365 Search UI Development

Supposedly every time you want to make a change you’re supposed to have a JavaScript developer wind through a mountain of code and add some new functionality (type-ahead or recommendations, promotions, whatever). This is the way we’ve always done it in the Interweb era. However, it is a lot slower than the client-server days where you could drag-and-drop a WYSIWYG interface. Besides, surely someone has developed nearly everything we can think of by now. Why can’t your e-commerce search be “Legoware” and just rapidly re-arrange the blocks when it is time to update the interface?

As it turns out, you’ve got one up on the whiz-kid JavaScript developer. Lucidworks has already written nearly any advanced feature of your search UI that you can think of. It is a matter of wiring the right components together and putting your skin on. When it is time to change, move stuff around or add new components. Again, you need to be able to change your site at any moment and with rapid turn around. Fusion App Studio lets you do just that.

Fusion is your 24x7x365 Search Solution

You’ve got to stay up, accept changes to data, your system, and your UI at anytime while providing the most personalized tailored customer experience that the Internet allows. Lucidworks Fusion is built on the right architecture and has the right tools to let you do that.

Take Your Next Steps:

• EBook on how you can provide an Amazon-like experience using Fusion
• Try out Lucidworks Site Search.
• Take Fusion for a test-drive.
• Give us a ring, we’re here for you.