November 2021
Estimated reading time: 20 mins

Shoplazza is a leading global eCommerce Saas platform offering trusted powerful tools for global merchants to start, grow, market and manage their business of any size digitally, in simple terms, bring the brick-and-mortar stores online. Shoplazza commits to make eBusiness simpler, cheaper and better for anyone with its global platform and services that are engineered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver reliable, safe, seamless online shopping experiences for consumers around the world. Our merchants can effectively and economically leverage their businesses to scale at a global scope in just a few clicks.

Table of contents:
Episode 1
Shoplazza Software-as-a-Service model
Cloud computing concept
Episode 2
What is AWS and services offered?
Episode 3
Shoplazza eCommerce architecture
Episode 4
Deployment of Shoplazza applications

Shoplazza SaaS model

Whether you're a startup entrepreneur with an idea for a revolutionary new product or service, or you are anxiously working hard to expand present business at national or international scope. An online store with fully-operational-cycle functions, where customers from all over the world can easily find and access your digital eCommerce business, has been a trendy and proven business model for merchants of all sizes.

Traditionally, merchants either build a website or hire an expert to do that. However, as the rapid advancements in online eCommerce technology, anyone with a willing mind now is empowered and enabled by Shoplazza SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) based products. Okay, enough for the mystical high-tech jargon.

In plain English, Shoplazza offers an online platform where global merchants can access its unique products and services via monthly or annual subscriptions for building a fully functional online eCommerce store, such as with the implementations of product display, email subscription, traffic redirections, digital ads, shipping trackings, payment gateways and other business features that you need to complete a commerce transaction in any brick and mortar shops. In Shoplazza's case, you as a merchant only need to focus on your most important tasks, such as product design, customer services. On the other hand, Shoplazza, as a store-building-service-provider, will manage, maintain and scale all the online infrastructural systems, such as cyber security, platform stability, global web accessing speed, server side scaling etc.

This is roughly how Shoplazza serves global merchants, even though there are so much more
Underlying works being carried out behind the scene. Therefore, a clear boundary is drawn here, Shoplazza offers powerful online store building tools and management systems to merchants who are responsible for building, selling, managing any activities concerning their trademarks, products and services.

Why SaaS?

We've briefly covered the topic of SaaS and Shoplazza SaaS models. But you may still scratch your head with a big WHY? Why SaaS for eCommerce?

Let's put ourselves in a simple scenario. After a successful marketing campaign and concerted sales effort, dozens of customers either subscribe to your services or place dozens of orders for your products. Traditionally, merchants build their own store from scratch, rent servers and purchase storage to allow and maintain a certain acceptable speed for customers to access, browse, order or take other activities. It is expensive, inconvenient and complicated to scale up with your back-end resources. Once hardwares are invested, if the black-friday seasons once passed, traffic and in-bound order related processing workload reduces, it is not an economic way to handle regular business seasonal surges.

You’re ecstatic—until you realize you never architected your product for this level of success. You were so busy coding, raising capital, marketing, and selling, buying hardwares and softwares. But you never planned how you could scale your business freely with a Saas product.

With Shoplazza's one-stop drag-n-drop store-building tools, merchants can enjoy totally worry-free business solutions as Shoplazza handles elastic scaling up-n-down for back-end systems. Also, tons of free-of-charge built-in applications that help merchants to manage all aspects of their digital business are offered in Shoplazza AppStore, which are also deployed through AWS to ensure merchants at any corner of the world have a seamless experience of applying the needed Shoplazza built-in applications to their operations. We will talk about application deployment later at episode 4.

Benefits of moving your business to Shoplazza cloud

Go-to-Cloud is a very trendy topic during recent years, as the booming of cloud technologies. In fact, cloud computing includes tools and applications like data storage, servers, databases, networking and software. Rather than owning their own computing infrastructure or data centers, companies can rent access to anything from applications to storage from a cloud service provider.

Cloud computing transforms IT infrastructure into a utility: It lets you ‘plug into' infrastructure via the internet, and use computing resources without installing and maintaining them on-premises.

Cloud computing is on-demand access, via the internet, to computing resources—applications, servers (physical servers and virtual servers), data storage, development tools, networking capabilities, and more—hosted at a remote data center managed by a cloud services provider (or CSP). The CSP makes these resources available for a monthly subscription fee or bills them according to usage.
Compared to traditional on-premises IT, and depending on the cloud services you select, cloud computing helps do the following:
Lower IT costs: Cloud lets you offload some or most of the costs and effort of purchasing, installing, configuring, and managing your own on-premises infrastructure.
Improve agility and time-to-value: With cloud, your organization can start using enterprise applications in minutes, instead of waiting weeks or months for IT to respond to a request, purchase and configure supporting hardware, and install software. Cloud also lets you empower certain users—specifically developers and data scientists—to help themselves to software and support infrastructure.
Scale more easily and cost-effectively: Cloud provides elasticity—instead of purchasing excess capacity that sits unused during slow periods, you can scale capacity up and down in response to spikes and dips in traffic. You can also take advantage of your cloud provider’s global network to spread your applications closer to users around the world.

The term ‘cloud computing’ also refers to the technology that makes cloud work. This includes some form of virtualized IT infrastructure—servers, operating system software, networking, and other infrastructure that’s abstracted, using special software, so that it can be pooled and divided irrespective of physical hardware boundaries. For example, a single hardware server can be divided into multiple virtual servers.

Virtualization enables cloud providers to make maximum use of their data center resources. Not surprisingly, many corporations have adopted the cloud delivery model for their on-premises infrastructure so they can realize maximum utilization and cost savings vs. traditional IT infrastructure and offer the same self-service and agility to their end-users.

If you use a computer or mobile device at home or at work, you almost certainly use some form of cloud computing every day, whether it’s a cloud application like Google Gmail or Salesforce, streaming media like Netflix, or cloud file storage like Dropbox. According to a recent survey, 92% of organizations use cloud today (link resides outside IBM), and most of them plan to use it more within the next year.

Today, we covered a few simple concepts concerning cloud services and Shoplazza SaaS model. Next time, we will talk about AWS services and why Shoplazza chose AWS.
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