How Advanced Analytics Can Benefit E-Commerce Players

A global report suggests that only 0.5% of the business owners are using Big Data in their e-commerce businesses, and still the most significant chunk uses a myriad of write-off software and external tools for generic analytics. With the influx of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, scattered data is transformed into actionable insights and can be used for e-commerce companies to make the products and features more successful.

Big Data in Ecommerce

Big data deals with a vast amount of datasets, which stores, processes, and examines with the help of technology to derive meaningful insights to augment business operations and decision making. E-commerce websites collect various forms of data from website traffic and user behaviour by capturing and analyzing online purchase activity. E-commerce ventures can enhance the products and services for the consumer by implementing analytics.

Advanced Analytics for Smarter Decisions

The process of projecting future trends, events, behaviours, through collecting examining and analyzing trends and patterns from Big Data is known as Advanced Analytics. This includes Predictive Analytics, Data Modelling, and uncovers various trends related to the market, customer behaviour, interests, sentiments, and buying journey. E-commerce ventures can reap business benefits by implementing Advanced Analytics and discover significant opportunities for revenue growth. Through Advanced Analytics, businesses can make informed business by examining transactional data of the users.

Increased Revenues

The customer buying journey is linear, and an average user tends to switch between various websites, searches Google for promo codes, and checks multiple sites for reviews before making the final buying decision. There is also a high chance of users changing the devices between the buying journey and making the final purchase from another device altogether. By capturing and processing user interactional data, intelligent algorithms can help companies to learn online behaviours, generate user personas, and segment users into different personas.

Each in-depth consumer profile can segment users on the number of product views, past purchases, clicks, and deliver a robust personalized experience for the user to increase the chance of sales. Predictive intelligence engines in e-commerce improve the consumer experience by providing personalized recommendations.

Data-Driven Product Discovery and Development

It has always been an expensive task for enterprises to decide on the products to develop and sell on e-commerce platforms. Due to poor market research and ignoring customer needs, enterprises have faced 66% of the products that have failed in less than two years, reported by Hubspot. There has been a frenzy of new E-Commerce entrepreneurs capitalizing on short-term product trends rather than having a holistic industry outlook and for product development. The general market tendency is that market research is expensive, complicated, and will take months of time. However, that is no longer that case. Advanced Analytics can provide smaller teams with the power to achieve insights at a fraction of cost and generate an immense amount of growth by interpreting data systematically. The modern customer is highly vocal on the internet, including social media platforms, search engines, and provides an ample amount of data set for enterprises to thrive. If businesses can start to capture and process data, product development can become highly accurate and successful.

Pricing Strategy

E-Commerce businesses thrive on competitive pricing, and Advanced Analytics provides access to be microscopic with data and allows tracking of competitors prices, and price surges in real-time. By gathering and processing data, enterprises can understand customer interactions and buying behaviour. Data-driven price management has been quite profitable for companies into transportation like Uber and online travel agencies like Expedia. By implementing data and analytics, these companies have increased 27% business margin according to a report by Deloitte. The analytics-driven pricing strategy can help businesses to become flexible, agile and respond to ever-changing market needs. Advanced analytics in Big Data can bring competitive advantage for companies to achieve higher margins in the long run.

Way Forward

Advanced Analytics and E-commerce are a match made in heaven. If enterprises continue to analyse customer preferences and behaviour through Big Data Analytics, customer service and product development will get improved by leaps and bounds. Analytics can also help in reconciliation, auditing, identifying payment fraud, unauthorised affiliate links and can help companies to operate from a single centralised platform and monitor data through automation scripts.