Amazon Web Services (AWS) has secured two customer wins in the field of eCommerce, in the shape of fashion platform Zalando and Latin American online commerce and payments provider Mercado Libre.

Zalando has chosen AWS as its preferred cloud provider and cited machine learning (ML) as the key use case. The company will use ML to ‘innovate faster and offer a more personalised online shopping experience’.

On a practical level, it will involve reducing time to design, launch and scale new features for Zalando’s eCommerce platform, such as personalisation, as well as storing and analysing large volumes of data. The company will also look to utilise technologies such as augmented reality – allowing customers to virtually try on clothes – as a wider remit of developing and implementing new applications.

Mercado Libre, meanwhile, will also utilise machine learning, applying AWS’ services to enhance security across its divisions and deliver a better customer experience. Amazon Rekognition, AWS’ video and image analysis offering, is used as part of Mercado Libre’s identity verification process, looking to minimise fraud.

There is a difference in semantics – Mercado Libre has selected AWS as its primary cloud provider, not preferred – but the overall vision remains. The company is building MeliLake, a data lake built on Amazon S3, to help company-wide analysis of data, ingested and funneled through sales, payments, fulfilment, and shipping transactions. Mercado Libre is also working with Tableau and MicroStrategy, AWS partners, to automatically tag, search, and share transaction data.

Klaus Burg, general manager for AWS EMEA SARL, said Zolando was ‘a great example of a company that is using machine learning to build, test, and introduce new and more personalised features at scale.’

The wider retail space is one of fierce competition for the largest cloud providers. Google Cloud cites it, alongside healthcare and finance, as one of its three primary customer acquisition targets, with the company named by Canalys in September as the best cloud for retail. For some retailers, the omnipresence of Amazon’s eCommerce offerings has led them to go elsewhere – which makes this an especially interesting customer account from an AWS perspective.

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