Hadoop: Cost effective way to process Ecommerce data

Companies are vying different ways of discovering the value of letting customers create their own unique products. Almost all e-commerce giants leverage Big Data to present a personalized set of products to their customers and Amazon is a successful example.

Now, let us look at how small and medium size retailers can explore the driving force – bigdata, and how Hadoop can help in this journey.

Hadoop is an open source tool for processing big data. It is an open source framework where data can be stored and processed. It is one of the most used and highly ranked platform for big data processing. Hadoop brings many advantages while applying it in processing of big data. Hadoop allows users to handle increasing volumes of data quickly and efficiently. That makes it friendlier with retail sector –ecommerce as well. There are many practical advantages of using Hadoop.

Hadoop having two parts in its core, one is HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) for data storing purpose and other is MapReduce for processing data. Whenever any data comes to Hadoop it breaks those data into small “chunks” and then those small-small part of data store in different Hadoop clusters across the server.

Hadoop framework is extensively used for ecommerce data processing that comes from different sources and analysis. Processing data using Hadoop is a cost effective way to find insight.

Shopping experience has been changing from traditional offline way to online marketing. Concept of brand is getting replaced with customer personalization. Now power has been shifted to consumers from shoppers. So, all ecommerce companies try to attract consumers with many plans. There are many application of Hadoop in ecommerce because of its cost effective data processing characteristic. Some application of Hadoop in ecommerce sector are:

Personalized offer – As we discussed above that shopping experience has been changed in recent years and power shifted to consumers from shoppers. So now customers are important. All ecommerce companies want to treat each customer in personal manner. Customers shop with same retailers in different ways. So using Hadoop retailers collect data of same customer from different sources and provide personalized offer for them.

Improve customer service – Online retailers use big data for a good customer service. Using Hadoop they track the customer data whenever customer contact representatives then customer data should be in front of customer care representative, so they won’t need to ask anything from customer and customer will feel special.

Fraud detection – Using Hadoop retailers detect the patterns of fraudulent. Hadoop is the simplest and best method to detect the pattern of fraudulent. Any other method will be cause for high expenses without certainty of correct result.

Dynamic pricing – These days in ecommerce sector competition is too high. So always each organisation needs to be alert about other rival companies that what they are doing and how? For example pricing. As a customer you may find some difference in price of same product on different retailers. So, companies are using Hadoop to find the changing pattern in price of their competitors and be ready for those situations.

These are the few ways through which we can know that using Hadoop in ecommerce business is a cost effective way to get a solution rather than any other way. The use of big data in business make the business more attractive and successful, and Hadoop makes it even more appealing. So ecommerce companies are steadily moving to apply Hadoop to increase returns and reduce effort.