Ecommerce is one of the fastest growing industries, and it is defined by cut-throat competition. There are many failure stories you can hear about ecommerce entrepreneurs who started their business by seeing a huge scope, but failed mostly due to their incapability to handle due to the lack of technological knowledge or effective marketing strategies.
Essentially, one should know the role of analytics to do smarter business in ecommerce domain. If you are struggling with an e-commerce business, then it is ideal to now start thinking of the scope of analytics to avoid bankruptcy. Further in this article, we will discuss a few important roles analytics play in this industry.
Ecommerce industry
As it is mentioned before, this is an exponentially growing industry, and with its underlying technology changing day by day, more and more opportunities are created for all. There are many major players in this domain such as Amazon and eBay that are successfully using predictive algorithms and executing it in real-time big data environment.
We just mentioned some big words, which when combined together, can deliver really unmatchable and uniquely big results in ecommerce.
- At the first point, ecommerce businesses have constantly evolved in data-assisted decision making process. At olden times, it was just basket analysis to make recommendations, but today, predictive algorithms based on each customer behavior are executed in real time.
- Secondly, to avoid a situation when you have to search for the debt consolidation meaning after suffering significant loss, effective recommendation systems need to be in place. Previously, it used to take days to make suggestions, but now it can be executed in just seconds, which makes it highly effective.
- Thirdly, things have now changed to a big data environment. We cannot see data in the tabular format any more. There are billions of activities by millions of customers every hour, and data acquisition and processing need to be effectively paralleled seamlessly without the customer getting notified about it for effective execution.
Functional support by analytics in ecommerce
- SCM – Supply chain management
This consists of managing the data of products starting from the warehouse through it reaching to the customer. Ecommerce industries extensively use analytics to manage their Inventories.
- Fraud detection
At one point in time, there were many fraudulent activities existing in the industry, and it drove the customers away from. Previously such frauds were manually handled, but with the help of predictive algorithms, fraudulence is detected effectively at the first point.
- Merchant analytics
Merchants play vital in ecommerce industry. If they grow, the e-com providers also grow. So, the e-com providers need to do extensive analysis of the merchants to explore new markets. Such decision making is much easier for the e-com businesses with the help of analytics and big data.
Along with the above, recommender systems, product specific analytics, online marketing analytics, and user experience analytics too play vital in the industry. It’s all about the customer centricity when we assess the success of Amazon or eBay, and this is largely achieved through data analytics.
