How e-commerce businesses can use big data to their advantage.
The big potential impact of big data on e-commerce businesses.
Big data is a big deal. In fact, according to Forbes.com, “Retailers who leverage the full power of big data could increase their operating margins by as much as 60%.”
The internet and social media have led to a huge increase in available data that businesses can use on and offline to target their customer base and improve their customer experience. While this data is important and can tell businesses a lot of important things about their customers, industry, and products, without a meaningful way to analyze this influx in data quantity, it wasn’t helpful, usable, or valuable to most businesses. Data analysts, computer scientists, developers, and programmers have been tasked with creating big-data analysis.
While there is no shortage of industries that can benefit from big data reporting, e-commerce has come out as one of the leaders in industries impacted. Here are several ways that ecommerce analytics are shaping the future of e-commerce.
Understanding Customer Behavior
If you understand what your customers are looking for, you can provide it for them. Big data analytics give you insight into your customer behaviors on your website – things like pages they visited, how long they were engaged, whether they abandoned their cart before making a purchase. Knowing the touch points your customers make – and more importantly, which ones they don’t make or where the interaction peters out – helps you understand what might be keeping your target market from converting from visitors to customers.
Better Customer Experience
In addition to understanding the moves your customers are making on your retail website, big data analytics tools can help you aggregate and analyze data from disparate sources. This means you can combine data streams – website analytics, email marketing data, social media data, and other information can be combined by big data analytics programs to help you have a more comprehensive understanding of your customer expectations.
Knowing what’s working and what isn’t across all the points your customer interacts with your brand is one of the best ways to tweak your content and your processes to help increase engagement. Big data takes the guessing out of your reporting and can help you make adjustments to your products and processes that align better with customer wants and needs.
Predict Trends and Tackle Inventory
Having an influx of data can be overwhelming, but having the tools to sort through it is invaluable. Big data can help you see patterns in customer buying and allow you predict purchases over time. This can help you plan better marketing campaigns and solidify pricing well in advance. It also helps you keep your products in stock so you don’t run into inventory issues – with either shortages or expensive excesses.
Big data and big data analytics in e-commerce are really helping to shape the retail landscape and help businesses and their sales and marketing teams understand how to plan their short-term and long-term strategies.
