Ecommerce has been showing an instrumental growth in terms of business as well as expansion. In the decade, we came across a long way. We witnessed so many changes in the customer interaction pattern as well as business conduction. When it was typically started with selling the books and an idea of ebooks, now, we could get everything just on a single click.
Technology indeed played a key role in bringing this innovation. Time being, now, we have more platforms to interact with people, share our story, and connect with the prospects. The increase in the count of options increased the opportunities as well. Thankfully, more options give more data.
Do you know with Whatsapp alone, people are sharing more than 65 billion messages every day?
Yes, indeed! And there are so many platforms. We have social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. The professional platform like LinkedIn, communities as well as discussion forums other than the websites and blogging platforms.
People, as well as businesses out there, are using all these platforms to build their network and to grow as a community. Amazingly each one of these platforms collects and gathers some user data. Also, they generate analytics of all the data.
Big data is nothing but an enormous collection of data. And, all this data is coming from all the platforms, websites, tools available out there to improve the user interaction. This data may or may not be arranged in an understandable format. However, big data is now turning to giant data sources. We believe that you already understood that thing by now.
For your ecommerce store, you will have several sources and tools that can help you with collecting all the essential and relevant data for your business. But, the collection doesn’t make sense if you can’t understand and utilize it. To understand this utility, you must know the use cases where data can be helpful for your business.
Leveraging your data analytics tools, you can get the solutions for these use cases:
● In painting the picture of customer personas
As and when you start selling your products in the market, you create an ideal image of your buyers. The buyer personas give an idea about how your customer may look. Still, there is no surety that every person will fit in that category. There can be a lot many changes in the user profile, and your persona can be just the opposite of what you’ve just thought of.
By getting more insights about your user demographics, you can take a closer picture of your buyer persona. With the targeted audience, you can optimize your campaigns and improve the conversion rate of your store. You will be able to drive better results and save on your campaign budget. Well, this will bring a positive impact on the ROI, be it indirectly.
Our recommendation would be to check for customer demographics and behavioral patterns on social media platforms as well as community forums. The users and visitors are much open about the choices and their views. It will surely bring more insights than interacting on your site. The analytical study can open new perceptions towards your business or offerings and the ways of improvement.
● Offering personalized experience
The personalized shopping experience is one of the primary reasons behind customers liking this idea of online shopping. Also, it is this very reason that increases the conversion rate of businesses.
The data in the behavior section helps you understand the customer demographics; the acquisition and conversion history tells you about the products purchased or searched. Thankfully, cookie policies let you trace the activity of each user in your store. Further, this data can be deployed in remarketing and increasing the chances of customers to interact with your business.
When a customer is getting exactly what they are looking for, there are more chances of getting satisfied customers. And, a satisfied customer can be a repeat customer and refer to others as well. That’s why product personalization is the key to gain the traction of more and more customers towards your business.
● Demand forecasting
The major benefit of data is, it talks about the present, past, as well as the future. The analytical reports of your store will share the information of best selling, low selling, out of stock products as well as the upcoming trends. If you want to confirm it, you can check with Google Trends to add more clarity to your decisions and thought processes.
The demand forecasting gives you insights about the upcoming demand for the product. Thus, giving you a chance to add products in your inventory and be ready with your stock to serve in the peak timing of your business.
An option of predictive analysis plays with the probability and shares the possibility of future events. With your readiness for future trends, you will be ready with the full proof plan. In this way, you will not be risking your business and work along with the enhanced decision making options. This will make it easier for you to overcome challenges and adapt new changes along with.
● Supply chain management
A businessman never puts all of the eggs in the single basket. To make the most out of business, you must be trying with two platforms, at least. With a wide range of product categories and a huge inventory, it can be tricky for you to manage your supply chain. You have to hire a resource for doing so, or you have to check it manually.
With the help of big data, you will understand the utility of tools and ideas that can automate your not-so-important tasks. Automation of different business tasks will streamline the business activities and let you save on your budget of hiring different resources. We recommend you to automate and then hire resources with a well-organized plan about the things to be taken care of. In this way, you will be able to handle a lot of things in a much easier fashion.
● Adding security measures
You can audit your site and check with the purchase channels as well. With single-page checkout options, you can reduce the risk of losing customers at the end of the conversion funnel. Also, you can track the reasons behind customers leaving, or certain payment gateways have any issue. To patch the weak spots, you can add security patches. Further, you can enable two-factor authentication and adapt biometric ideas on mobile devices.
With improved security for native mobile apps and two-factor authentication/OTP verification on ecommerce stores, you can check the security options that are performing better than the others. You will not only reduce cyber crimes but be able to regulate and update your store with the novel ideas that you need to add to your store to win customer’s trust.
The success of your store depends on your analysis of the situation as well as the data you are gathering from them. To flourish your business, it is important to start small, but start analyzing the information that you are acquiring from all the sources. Data can help you gain insights and understand the scope of improvisation in every possible way.
