Leveraging Big Data for Ecommerce business

Recent shift in consumers’ acceptance of the benefits of online shopping experience puts greater stress on retailers and their strategies. Online shopping gives a stress free and uncrowded environment that ecommerce business offers from last few years. All activity in ecommerce business is done in internet world and hence, it generate a huge amount of data i.e. big data.

Big data is a huge collection of data comes from different sources such as social media, web browsing, and many other sources. Companies leverage these data to find useful information from it.

The most powerful impact of big data on business is identify hidden pattern and decision support. Decision making based on data insight always have a better probability of success than the decisions based on guess or gut feel.

Nidhi Agarwal, Founder and CIO, KAARYAH adds, “Big data makes a lot of relevance for ecommerce companies who want to stay agile and relevant to their customers. The companies are monitoring customer consumption patterns and convert them into product level inputs to improve products and introduce new products. Also, the speed of consumption combined with our agile production system leads to large working capital efficiencies.”

There are many areas where ecommerce companies leveraging big data and enjoying its benefits. Some of the area where ecommerce companies gaining benefits by leveraging big data are:

Data driven decisions – Almost all marketing or product related decisions is based on real time or near real time data analysis result. For making any decision, there should be a strong base behind that. Always decisions based on real time data information is more effective and fruitful.

Personalized offer – Analysis of data helps ecommerce companies to target their right audience in more effective ways. It helps customer to find what they want and as the result sales always become faster. Companies provide custom offers on the basis of customer interest and preference based on their earlier shopping history combined with their multiple other data sources. According to Amitabh Mishra, CTO, snapdeal “We have total 14 properties like ‘Viewers also viewed,’ ‘similar products,’ ‘trending now’, etc. on site for every viewers or customers who visited our website and the big data platforms when put together influence 40% of the orders we receive today”. It shows the strength of big data in ecommerce.

Supply chain management – Supply chain optimization is one of the most critical success factor of ecommerce business. Companies often leverage big data for their supply chain also. Using big data analytics, ecommerce companies plan their delivery route, reduced cost, preferred time for delivery and many more.

Fraud detection – Big data also helps in detecting fraudulent by analysing patterns, payment methods and browsing history. A report published by Aberdeen – a fact based research company says that after analysing different types of frauds and companies behaviour it came in picture that 16% of respondent say that detecting fraud was a primary use for their analytic suite.

Organized data – Organizing the data coming from multiple sources is also a big challenge in ecommerce business. All data need to collect, store and organize for the further use. Big data helps to find the way to organize data and enable business people to find useful insight from those data and apply in day-today decision making.

If you are in ecommerce industry – yes, leverage big data analysis for business decision. It really does not matter the size of your business today. Big data is one of the most important success factor of ecommerce business and by applying big data analytics, ecommerce you can make better business models to drive up sales day-by-day.