Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
Ask anyone and they’ll tell you that data is king. It’s why Wayfair and Rite Aid are now enlisting Google Cloud technology that will help them streamline their backend operations.
What does that mean? For Wayfair, the company finished migrating 100% of its cloud applications to Google Cloud this year, which now allows the company to scale and ensure a smooth customer transition during peak shopping periods, like the holidays.
- The company can now reduce the time it takes to create and deploy fraud and scam-detection machine learning models.
- Wayfair’s new customer-identification model will also help it identify professional customers to increase B2B orders.
- And the machine learning models will aid in creating a more personalized customer interaction that Google says will increase traffic and conversions.
Given Wayfair’s focus on the home category, delivering on personalized experiences is critical to giving it an edge over its competitors. “Google Cloud is a key part of our innovation strategy to adapt and thrive in a landscape that shifts as quickly as consumer preferences do,” Fiona Tan, Wayfair’s chief technology officer, told Retail Brew in a statement. “The complete migration of our data center operations to Google Cloud is an essential part of ensuring Wayfair’s long-term competitiveness and resilience. With this partnership, we’re better able to handle sudden traffic, empower our engineers with more autonomy, and use AI and [machine learning] to create a better shopping experience for our customers.”
For Rite Aid, the company is still in the process of migrating to Google Cloud, in a step toward the vision of becoming a modern pharmacy. For starters, the partnership will allow Rite Aid to migrate key applications like its vaccine-scheduling tool and messaging application to Google Cloud’s Anthos platform.
- The cloud-computing tech will be on-site at roughly 2,350 pharmacies, which will help operations during natural disasters without needing to be connected to on premise technology.
- Plus, Rite Aid has chosen Google Cloud’s retail search solution, which gives customers more precise search results when using the company’s e-comm website or mobile app.
“AI is built into internet searches, email spam filters, online shopping, digital photo services, and more. Similarly, it is also becoming a bigger part of the retail experience in all kinds of ways,” Carrie Tharp, VP of retail and consumer solutions at Google, said in a statement.