The B2C architecture for today and tomorrow

B2C applications have some unique challenges. Fundamentally, B2C applications are all about customer data and relationships. B2C platform providers must overcome both technical and content challenges in order to provide trusted, engaging, convenient and personalized interactions. This is especially true when dealing with distributed environments. Customer touchpoints are multiplying at an almost exponential rate, while the data being captured from each touchpoint and interaction is growing richer and more complex. In future interactions with the customer, you need to quickly access the relevant data and leverage it to build a personalized engagement. But the crucial challenge is how to synchronize and unify that disparately collected data into a common repository, and then provide it back out to the touchpoints, as needed.

Data storage in the cloud has provided the solution for capturing data from the multitude of touchpoints, but how to get the relevant synchronized data back out to the devices in order to build a personalized is still a major hurdle for most B2C providers.

Fortunately for us, Elliot Winskill, a Product Manager at PMC has spent the last 3 years studying this problem. He recently delivered an excellent presentation at Couchbase CONNECT, where he discusses the challenges facing B2C providers, as well as his perspective on how to successfully address those challenges.

Elliot starts by going through the design principles that drove their development process, as well as the challenges that they faced as they worked with B2C providers. He describes in detail how they evaluated and overcame the challenges of legacy applications, cost, connectivity, and experience.

The legacy challenge was addressed by using microservices to gradually evolve the application to be cloud enabled, without having to rewrite the entire application from scratch. Cost was tackled by moving away from the “servers in every store are the edge” existing architecture, and moving towards an architecture that combines cloud storage with “any device can be the edge”.

They addressed the cloud-to-device connectivity challenge by using Couchbase Mobile, Couchbase Sync Gateway, and Couchbase Server to provide consistent, cross-device experiences with near real-time online data. This data synchronization capability also ties directly into the final challenge of providing rich, engaging, personalized offline engagement experiences with online data, as needed.

As always, the proof is in the pudding. Elliot wraps up his presentation with a real-world example of a “Scan & Go” application. The architecture that PMC created enabled them to successfully build and deploy a solution in only 12 weeks, that allows a customer to walk into a store, scan an item, pay for it, and go.

Elliot wraps up the presentation by talking about the monitoring infrastructure that they’ve put in place to ensure the quality, reliability, and scalability of the application.

From my point of view, one of the key takeaways from the presentation is that this architecture, connecting the dots between storefront and consumer, was 5X less costly than building a similar enterprise-hosted solution. Truly, the “offline experience with online data” is the architecture for tomorrow.

For more details, please listen to the full presentation here.