Optimize and Process Millions of Digital Transactions in Real Time

In the rapidly evolving world of digital commerce, online retail shoppers expect more than just static storefronts, delayed updates, or manual inventory checks. They demand instant functionality, such as notifications about inventory status, real-time updates on pricing and availability, personalized promotions, and interactive social shopping experiences, regardless of their geographical location or the digital commerce platform they're using.

Optimizing your transactions provides a powerful solution to meet these demands by enabling eCommerce platforms to capture simultaneous transactions and ensure your users receive the most up-to-date product information instantly. Those who have a positive customer experience will help boost engagement and improve conversion rates, helping cement a platform that they will continue to come back to. While this sounds fantastic, there are three key challenges you’ll need to tackle first: global scalability, reliability, and compliance. Digital commerce platforms need to deliver real-time buyer data swiftly and reliably at scale, serving audiences across multiple regions, without sacrificing performance or incurring downtime. Additionally, safeguarding customer data requires adherence to technical standards like SOC 2 and ISO/IEC 27001:2013.

Fortunately, PubNub provides a scalable, reliable, and compliant real-time platform that can easily power buyer engagement and drive growth for your business needs. PubNub effortlessly processes over three trillion transactions and one billion unique devices per month, providing real-time speed, unmatched reliability with a 99.999% uptime SLA, and the scalability required to serve global audiences. PubNub provides a secure platform that powers over 2000 customers to deliver superior, real-time shopping experiences to their customers around the world. You can even utilize our Functions feature to connect to digital wallets such as PayPal to allow your customers to purchase products using digital payments.

Continue reading to learn how you can streamline your digital commerce ecosystem by utilizing PubNub's feature-rich platform to boost buyer engagement and retention, improve customer satisfaction, optimize operations, and drive business growth with seamless integration.

Why Optimizing Transactions Matters in Digital Commerce

Every online shopping customer is unique: they have different product preferences, buying behaviors, and expectations. Even with sophisticated online commerce platforms, delays in updating product availability and prices can negatively impact customer trust and conversion rates.

There are a variety of ways to optimize transactions and ensure your buyers always receive accurate, immediate updates, no matter how rapidly prices, inventory, or promotions change, especially during key sales such as product launches, flash sales, or holidays:

• Instant Notifications & Promotions: Engage customers with timely online/offline notifications, instant mobile push alerts, inventory management, and targeted promotions.

• Seamless Multi-platform Integration: Effortlessly integrate real-time commerce data across different digital channels (e.g., Shopify, Amazon, Magento). Enable consistent user experiences across web, mobile, IoT, and chatbots.

• Real-Time Personalization: Track buyer activity and tailor experiences instantly based on purchases or preferences. Deliver dynamic, multilingual content globally with on-the-fly language translation.

• Interactive Buyer Engagement: Instantly capture and react to buyer sentiment through interactive content and loyalty programs with real-time rewards tracking and personalized offers.

Regardless of the online store, devices, or even the products being sold, ensuring you are properly optimizing transactions is the best way to ensure your customers are getting the best experience possible and making the customer journey an enjoyable one.

How to Optimize Transactions with PubNub

The remainder of this blog will focus on two aspects of the PubNub platform: one for developers and the other for LiveOps. For developers, our core services process high volumes of data in real time, also known as data streaming, for instant notifications and promotions. Typically, the architecture of a data streaming involves receiving the data from another source, which is usually from a backend that makes API requests to the various digital commerce platforms. We’ll be focusing on the front-end, but to implement a backend, publish the message with PubNub (more on publishing shortly) on the backend server after obtaining the API data, as we’ll be subscribing to receive the data in the front-end. The second aspect is for LiveOps, by utilizing our Insights analytics tools to track buyer activity and utilizing Illuminate to tailor the experience based on purchases and make changes immediately to reward players.

You can think of this as one large iterative cycle, where you’ll be updating promotions, recommendations, and more functionality based on how your users react, where both developers and LiveOps teams will work together to create a more engaging experience.

Messages vs Signals vs Push Notifications

Before we get started in implementing PubNub, we need to cover three distinct ways of communicating information across the PubNub network: messages, signals, and push notifications. That way, you can choose which way you would like to communicate the data across your platform to optimize your transactions.

Messages

Messages contain any kind of serializable data, like objects, numbers, and UTF-8 encoded strings, typically in JSON format. To transmit Messages across the PubNub platform, you would Publish/Subscribe Publish (send) messages. To receive messages, clients will Subscribe to guarantee their messages will be delivered in the order they were sent. A mechanism called Channels is used to transmit this data between devices. This type of communication is called Pub/Sub and is the cornerstone of real-time messaging for features such as chat, IoT device control, data streaming, multiuser collaboration, and more.

Signals

Signals are ideal for high-volume, low-cost use cases. They're intended for sending small bits of data where the last sent data is the only important piece of information. While powerful and fast, they are restricted in payload size and do not support mobile push notifications.

Push Notifications

PubNub supports push notifications for mobile apps via PubNub’s Push Gateway. Since the application has already registered the device, you just need to provide the push registration token and format the message payload, which contains a reserved section for push notifications. You can then add your iOS, Android, messages, signals, and metadata all in one call, without needing to depend on the frameworks and libraries of the other services - all you need to do is include information in the payload, and let PubNub handle the rest.

The rest of the blog will focus on messages and push notifications to transmit data and notify other users.

Keyset Creation

You’ll need to create a free PubNub account to obtain your publish/subscribe keys, manage the settings for your application, and register your service provider’s certification. Learn more about getting started here.

If you would like to implement Push Notifications for your platform, you’ll need to enable the Push Notifications feature in the keyset so messages can be forwarded to the respective service providers you would like to target, and then register the devices in the actual applications. To enable FCM for Android devices, please follow the steps in this guide. For APNs for Apple devices, refer to this guide. .

SDK Initialization

The JavaScript SDK is used throughout the remainder of this blog, but please be sure to review our growing list of SDKs and choose the SDK that best suits your needs. And remember: PubNub is device and platform-agnostic, meaning transactions can occur between any kind of device and platform that can communicate online.

You can integrate PubNub using a content delivery network:

Or by using the package manager npm for Node.js applications:

Next, you’ll need to initialize the object to communicate with the PubNub platform using the publish and subscribe keys you obtained earlier from the Admin Portal.

Subscribe and Display Content

Digital commerce often involves extremely high message throughput. For the front-end, you’ll be subscribing to listen for messages sent across the network:

Mobile Push Notifications

As mentioned above, PubNub simplifies the push notification process by allowing you to include push notification payload information for both APNs and FCM service providers in the same message payload as the message.

It is highly recommended to follow our documentation in setting up mobile push notifications for your devices, as you’ll need to 1) register the devices that are going to receive push notifications and 2) configure the push notification payload information in the message. This can differ between SDKs, notably between our core vs chat SDKs, so please follow the SDK documentation you plan to implement push notifications. While the languages may differ, the essential process outlined above remains the same.

Once you’ve registered the devices and included the push notification configuration in each message payload, listen for the message and display the notification or alert as intended, especially if the application is in the background or closed.

Dive into Analytics and Utilize Decision Intelligence to Make Real-time Decisions

While you’ve just implemented the core services side of optimizing transactions, you need to consider how LiveOps can enhance each transaction by understanding its users and then making informed decisions on how to improve each transaction by tailoring the experience towards the user.

PubNub Insights helps you proactively adjust your plans with an evidence-based approach by having access to turnkey aggregated metrics built from your PubNub data. Perhaps you’ve noticed some of your users from one region are not purchasing some items as much as they are based on another region, or that during a flash sale, only several users purchased anything compared to items in carts.

Once you’ve better understood how your users are interacting with your platform, you can then optimize each transaction with more tailored recommendations utilizing decision intelligence.

PubNub Illuminate allows you to respond instantly without needing to take down your codebase or wait for a sale to finish to gather data.