E-commerce is a huge business and constantly growing. As opposed to brick and mortar retail, e-commerce is the result of the work of many tech professionals! How do they create the online shopping experience and make it easy and addicting? Find out in our new blog!
November is widely known as the month of e-commerce. During this month, the highly profitable Singles Day in China (11/11), Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are taking place, putting the excitement of shopping online in full swing. In the past few years, we’ve seen large growth in e-commerce as an alternative to in-person shopping.
In 2020 alone, e-commerce sales around the globe rose to US$4.2Tn, a 26% increase from 2019! Singles Day in China has broken records again, with consumers spending over US$139.1Bn during the world’s largest online shopping event.
With customers confined to their homes during the pandemic, the masses not only turned to the internet for their every day grocery shopping, but also replaced many brick and mortar retail habits with online shopping. At the peak of quarantine, many families got used to buying all of their products online. According to Forbes, the global pandemic increased online spending by more than US$183Bn, rising to a total of US$844Bn in the United States alone!
You might ask yourself, who’s behind the magic and scale of e-commerce that let’s the world keep shopping online? Well, it’s actually a lot of tech professionals! Amazon alone has a global tech staff of 275k, and has opened another 55k e-commerce related tech jobs for the coming months. The digital shopping industry has no plans of stopping!
From a Shopping Experience to a Delivered Package: The Technology Talent Behind E-commerce
Selling products online requires a strong and diverse tech team.
To begin, building and programming great digital experiences require creative Product Managers and UI/UX Designers. They must ensure that the user experience looks, flows, and feels the best it can be. The UI/UX Designer provides the development team with visuals for the interface elements. Using the product stories and images as instructions, the developer team brings the online shop to life.
Programming the vision of the Product Manager and the UI/UX Designers are Full-Stack Developers and Frontend Developers. They take the plans and program them into a functional website or app. Frontend Developers focus closely on what the user will see–the shop’s interface, texts, images, buttons, links, and more.
Full-Stack Developers also program the backend of the e-commerce shop and its interaction with other systems. This includes, for example, programming the databases that hold the catalogue and customer details, ensuring stability and availability of the service upon traffic in scale, and integrating payment gateways so people can complete their purchase.
Where there’s money, there are hackers and fraudsters, trying to get their hands on it. Fraudulent shopping and selling credit card details on Darknet are some of the popular scams occurring daily. Therefore, it is important for e-commerce businesses to protect their cloud and IT infrastructures against fraud, theft, and hacks.
Cybersecurity Specialists serve a pivotal function in this respect, reducing vulnerabilities to systems and adding additional layers of protection. They also monitor platforms and transactions to identify anomalies and attacks in order to prevent loss for the merchants and increase consumer confidence in the platform.
With the shop ready for consumers to spend their hard earned money, Digital Marketing Specialists use their expertise to bring traffic to the shop and celebrate deals on social channels. Data Analysts carefully analyze the traffic and consumer behavior for insights and optimization, seeing what products are popular, how long it takes customers to complete a transaction, and other consumer patterns that the company can use to its advantage. Lastly, Data Scientists make models to forecast trends and prepare the e-commerce company for the future.
Giving An E-commerce Gift To Yourself!
Top e-commerce companies like Amazon and eBay are paving the way for hundreds of thousands of e-commerce related tech jobs to be created and opened, at enterprises, startups, and the surrounding ecosystem.
While it may seem like entering into the tech sector or e-commerce industry may require tons of experience and years of schooling, the truth is that it’s a lot easier now than ever before! In fact, tech reskilling programs like Wawiwa Tech Training give every day people with no tech background the opportunity to get lucrative tech and e-commerce jobs in as little as 6 to 9 months.
With this great time of unprecedented growth, the holiday season serves as a perfect reminder that an opportunity to turn your career around is only a single decision away. Be part of the joy that this gift-giving season brings, and treat yourself to a new career path in tech!
