- Google Cloud is teaming up with retailers to improve their e-commerce businesses and prevent website outages on high-traffic shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
- Business Insider spoke with Carrie Tharp, Google's vice president of retail, about where retailers are going wrong when it comes to digital growth and ways they can use cloud-based technologies to streamline operations.
- "Something as simple as a tiny recommendation engine in a workflow could create a hiccup that then impacts the rest of the website," Tharp said. "Every time I've personally had an outage, it's related to something that could have been shut off and not affected transactions in any way."
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While most modern retailers know they need to be as digitally advanced as ever in order to stay competitive, many are still struggling to keep their websites from crashing on big days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Enter Google Cloud. Google's vice president of retail, Carrie Tharp, and her team are focused on bridging the gap and bringing the retailers that are lagging behind safely into the 21st century. With the help of cloud-based technologies, Google is hoping to improve digital infrastructures to prevent outages on major shopping days.
Though Tharp has only been at the helm of Google's retail group for about six months, she has an extensive background in retail. She formerly oversaw digital operations at Neiman Marcus and led e-commerce at Fossil during transformative moments for both companies.
We caught up with Tharp at the National Retail Federation's Big Show, where she told us how Google is assisting brands that are struggling to keep up digitally and how the cloud can improve areas like inventory forecasting and sustainability.
The following interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
Business Insider: What types of problems are you most focused on solving for retailers hoping to improve their e-commerce businesses?
Carrie Tharp: Retailers are still struggling to handle the scalability and reliability needed to handle peaks in traffic. When you think of different marketing channels today outside of Black Friday through Cyber Monday, there can be a lot of variability in spikiness and traffic related to promotions. Retail is highly promotional, so how do you manage all that seamlessly? We focus on that.
BI: Beyond traffic, what factors are contributing to retail website outages?
Tharp: Something as simple as a tiny recommendation engine in a workflow could create a hiccup that then impacts the rest of the website, even though they were completely unrelated. So some of the work about modernizing and moving to the cloud is thinking through those dynamics so you create less choke points to potentially cause a shutdown. Every time I've personally had an outage, it's related to something that could have been shut off and not affected transactions in any way.
BI: How are you working with retailers to solve these problems?
Tharp: We have a specific program called customer reliability engineering, which is essentially our team sitting shoulder to shoulder with the retailer's team and taking on that peak load management scalability.
BI: Is there a type of retailer that Google is particularly focused on teaming with?
Tharp: We work across all retail segments. The way we think about our product catalog right now is actually looking at common workflows. So if you think of grocery versus specialty versus big box, there are different products for all of those players, but similar business processes, merchants, and planners doing the same work.
BI: How would you say Google sets itself apart from other cloud-computing technologies?
Tharp: We really think of ourselves as the retail innovation partner of choice. Google touches the consumer at many parts of their journey, and retailers are all at different places regarding how much they've leveraged these tools and really optimized from a journey perspective.
BI: How are you using cloud-based technologies to help retailers improve areas like sustainability?
Tharp: We're really focused on demand forecasting. When you think about a retailer or a wholesaler, there are several steps of waste along the way. It can often start with forecasts: if a retailer bought too much, when they've put product in the wrong places and are trying to clear it, and how retailers do markdowns and work through that inventory.
To me, there's a lot of sustainability issues around shipping and fulfillment. Now, people buy multiple sizes and multiple things, and they're only going to keep one. That's a lot of shipping back and forth. So we're also working on things like shipping fulfillment optimization to minimize that footprint and impact. There are a lot of retailers out there that are taking returns at store locations and having customers ease that friction with things like TrueFit, a partner that's helping people with fit from the onset.
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