Hadoop for Ecommerce data processing

Retailers always want real time or near real time analysis of huge data sets that change rapidly or have a very short life, for example web shopping cart. We know that Ecommerce companies sit on huge amount of data due to a large number of transaction & inventory. And for that, retailers leverage Hadoop technology for quick and large volume data processing.

Data processing is a process of manipulating the stored data for further use. Stored dump data need to be converted into meaningful and can be used for decision support. So, after processing the data, it can be fit for different purpose as per requirement. After processing, data format may change, means data may be modified and it cannot be the same that it was earlier.

Hadoop is one of the highly used platform for big data processing. Hadoop has established itself as the highly demanded tools in big data sector. Hadoop is used for data storing as well as data processing. For both purpose it is having different part inside it- for data storing HDFS is there and for data processing MapReduce is there. With the help of Hadoop, retailers started shifting their focus on individual marketing by giving customized retail experience.

Hadoop is the widely used framework for big data processing and MapReduce is the most important massive data processing tool for ecommerce data processing. Once Gartner had predicted “Hadoop will be in most advanced analytics products by 2015” and now we can see that their prediction became close to 100 % correct. There are many reports published on Hadoop which convey about the importance of Hadoop in Big data. Some of them are:

A report of Technology Research Organization says that “The data market currently with the fastest growth are Hadoop and NoSQL software and services”.

According to the Big Data Executive survey “Almost 90% organisations which are leveraging big data have embarked on Hadoop related projects and thus Hadoop skills are in huge demand”.

These are some survey reports that convey the importance of Hadoop in ecommerce data processing.

Now we will see that how and why we use Hadoop for data processing. First see the answer of How?

Hadoop is an open source data management technology which having both data storing capacity as well as data processing. Hadoop distributed file system i.e. HDFS is used for data storage and MapReduce is used for data processing. Whenever data come in Hadoop it break all data in small chunks and store it on different clusters across the server. After storing data, MapReduce job runs according to the requirement.

Now we will answer the question of why i.e. Why ecommerce uses Hadoop for data processing?

Using Hadoop, ecommerce companies process data to utilize big data insight to ensure high profitability. Some of the area where they use analysis result that comes after data processing are:

• Personalized marketing
• Fraud detection
• Improved customer service
• Dynamic pricing

These are the few areas where Hadoop helps ecommerce sector to ensure high value service.

Hadoop having some advantages that make it better from other tools. It is based on distributing computing concept that makes it different from others. Due to its scalability and effectiveness, companies are heavily adopting Hadoop for data processing.