What is universal standard in e-commerce?

Universal Standard reduced latency, increased revenue, and improved the user experience by migrating to a modern ecommerce architecture from AWS Retail Competency Partner Layer0. The small retail company wanted to improve its website performance but had limited control over its monolithic server-based architecture. Universal Standard chose to migrate to a serverless architecture from Layer0, powered by multiple AWS services, including AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway. Using this solution, Universal Standard improved its retail performance and delivered a stronger digital experience, increasing mobile conversions by 200 percent and unlocking an 81 percent year-over-year revenue increase.

Universal Standard aims to provide high-quality size-inclusive clothing through its desktop and mobile website, which it hosted on a monolithic, server-based architecture. This infrastructure contributed to high page load times that affected the customer experience, impacting the retail company’s conversion rates. To reduce latency and better meet the competitive demands of the retail industry, Universal Standard sought to modernize its website and improve the user experience with the help of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Retail Competency Partner Layer0 by Limelight. Limelight has one of the world’s largest networks. Since the implementation, Layer0 has helped Universal Standard increase revenue, reduce page load times, and unlock improvements in session duration, average order value, and mobile conversion rates.

“We could also provide high stability, scalability, and security because our solution inherits key features and compliance controls from AWS services.”

- Lauren Bradley, Content Marketing Manager, Layer0

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in New York City, Universal Standard sells clothing in sizes 00–40. To support its website, the company relied on server-based infrastructure from its content management system. However, this solution contributed to high latency on the website, impacting the user experience. “Universal Standard needed infrastructure that could speed up development, which would help it achieve certain goals like optimizing for site speed,” says Lauren Bradley, content marketing manager at Layer0. Universal Standard also wanted to modernize its infrastructure so that it could improve the customer and developer experience.

Layer0 provides infrastructure and tooling to support websites with large databases and has used AWS services to power its solutions since 2011. As an AWS Independent Software Vendor, Layer0 has achieved the AWS Retail Competency and builds solutions designed to support retail customers as well as clients in the travel, hospitality, and financial services industries. Universal Standard engaged Layer0 to help it migrate to a higher-performing ecommerce architecture. “Universal Standard chose our solution for its speed capabilities,” says Bradley. “We could also provide high stability, scalability, and security because our solution inherits key features and compliance controls from AWS services.”

In February 2020, Layer0 began to help Universal Standard migrate from its monolithic infrastructure to a serverless architecture powered by multiple AWS services, including Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.

Layer0’s solution is powered by serverless, API-driven architecture on AWS, facilitated by Amazon API Gateway as well as AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets developers run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. Instead of hosting everything on a single server, this API-based architecture runs different components of Universal Standard’s website infrastructure separately, improving speed and performance. “Immediately after launching Layer0’s solution, Universal Standard’s page load times dropped from 4–7 s to about 1.5 s,” says Bradley. Now, Universal Standard can load transition pages in 600 ms and its home page in 1.5 s.

Universal Standard has also improved its development speeds using Layer0’s modern infrastructure. For example, the solution uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance, to store media and static assets for Universal Standard. “Using Amazon S3 helps Universal Standard easily view different website deployments and perform A/B tests,” says Matt Gilbert, head of marketing at Layer0. “We’re able to provision infrastructure on AWS for each developer, where their traffic is not impacted by any other users.” To securely provision AWS accounts for different developers, Layer0 uses AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM), which lets customers create and manage AWS users and groups and use permissions to allow and deny access to AWS resources. Layer0’s solution has helped Universal Standard increase its developer velocity significantly. The Universal Standard team is able to develop, test, and deploy changes to its website at a faster pace, improving the company’s speed to market.

Universal Standard has also seen significant business growth by providing its customers with a faster, higher-performing website experience, particularly among mobile users. “Before Universal Standard migrated, its traffic was evenly split between desktop and mobile, but its conversion rate was much lower on mobile,” says Bradley. “After the migration, 70 percent of its traffic now comes from mobile users, which has brought incredible business wins.” Universal Standard increased its mobile conversion rate by 200 percent since migrating to Layer0’s architecture. Additionally, Universal Standard has reduced its bounce rate by 60 percent and increased its average session duration by 200 percent. This improved website experience has translated into tangible growth for Universal Standard; it has increased average order value by 42 percent and unlocked an 81 percent increase in revenue year over year.

“Immediately after launching Layer0’s solution, Universal Standard’s page load times dropped from 4–7 s to about 1.5 s.” 

- Lauren Bradley, Content Marketing Manager, Layer0

In the future, Universal Standard and Layer0 will continue to create, test, and deploy new website updates, further enhancing the customer experience and improving Universal Standard’s ecommerce performance in the competitive retail industry. For example, it will continue to work with Layer0 to advance its website accessibility features, maximize speed and performance, and iterate its user experience and brand design for different devices and markets.

By migrating to a modern, serverless ecommerce architecture from Layer0, Universal Standard accelerated its development speeds, reduced latency, and unlocked business growth. “We plan on working with Universal Standard to continue to build and improve the site,” says Gilbert. “Our teams are both very forward-thinking.”

Universal Standard is a fashion brand that creates and sells clothes in sizes 00–40. Headquartered in New York City, USA, its mission is to expand access to high-quality clothing for people of all sizes.

Layer0 is a software company based in San Francisco, California. An AWS Retail Competency Partner, Layer0 offers tools and infrastructure to help retailers shorten response times, increase conversion rates, and enhance user experiences.

Adrian Leal

ITS 380-001

Shin-Ping

CH1: The Revolution Is Just Beginning

Case Study Questions

1.      Why does Pinterest view Google as its primary competitor?

Pinterest defines itself as a tool to discover and save potential purchases and ideas. Google is considered the main dominant search tool, for that reason it is considered its primary competitor.

2.      Why does Pinterest focus on the smartphone platform when it develops new features and products?

The vast majority of Pinterest’s traffic activity it is originated by mobile devices, considering that most of its activity comes from mobile devices, it makes sense that they focus on the smartphone platform when developing new featues and products.

3.      Why is copyright infringement a potential issue for Pinterest?

Copyright infringement is a potential issue for Pinterest because the users post pictures from other people without any kind of permit. This is causing Pinterest some problems, furthermore, they are having similar issues with videos posted from YouTube and similar sources.

Questions

1.      What is e-commerce? How does it differ from e-business? Where does it intersect with e-business?

E-commerce involves digitally transaction between and among companies and customers. E-business includes the digital transactions within a firm, with no commercial transactions. They intersect when e-business realizes any transaction with a different organization such as suppliers.

5.      What are three benefits of universal standards?

-          Universal standards reduce the price of the products for customers and the costs for businesses.

-          Reduce search cost for customers, which is the effort required to find suitable products.

-          Makes easier to share things, for instance, anyone can open a URL from a different country and find the information he was looking for.

10.  How are e-commerce technologies similar to or different from other technologies that have changed commerce in the past?

I believe the Internet, e-commerce, is changing the commerce at a faster pace than other technologies did in the past. Radio helped to reach to a big portion of the population and audio commercials, television helped to reach the whole population and to keep them watching big events, such as the Super Bowl, where companies placed their commercials to reach a big percentage of the population showing them their products and services. However, none of these technologies was neither 100% global, nor could realize transaction there. That is why I think e-commerce is more powerful and it is increasing faster than previous technologies.

15.  Discuss the ways in which the early years of e-commerce can be considered both a success and a failure.

The early years of e-commerce can be considered as a success since the growth of it has been greater that similar technologies in the past that have changed commerce. Furthermore, this trend is expected to continue during the following years and e-commerce will end up representing a big percentage of our economy. Some failures of e-commerce are regulations and security. People publish more and more information about themselves on the Internet, and even though it does not look like the information that we provide is easily accessible, it actually is. It does not feel that security mechanisms have increased as much as e-commerce has.

Projects

Given the development and history of e-commerce in the years from 1995-2015, what do you predict we will see during the next five years of e-commerce? Describe some of the technological, business, and societal shifts that may occur as the Internet continues to grow and expand. Prepare a brief presentation or written report to explain your vision of what e-commerce will look like in 2019.

E-commerce is increasing potentially every year, and this tendency is going to continue during the following years. The image attached to the next page shows the future predictions from India. India is expected to double its e-commerce in only five years from 2015 to 2020. As India, I expect that the rest of the world follows this tendency.

This evolution is changing the way consumers buy and the way business sale their products and services. Every year the volume of sales that customer make online increase. A good example of this is how Amazon and other websites are continuosly increasing their sales.  My expectations are that by 2019, mostly of the population will make most of their buying operations online, from buying groceries and clothes to buy a TVs and furniture. This change will also change the labor demand, for instance, the demand of cashier will be reduced but the number of people that knows how to manage a website and sell online will increase, and that is already happening today.

Some people would say that the world is moving to a world “dominated by computers”, but I do not see that way. I think technology if it is well used, is facilitating our life, and has found the “convenience”, this word that is used more and more every day by multinational companies and marketing strategies, that the customers and the society were looking for.