5 Ways Big Data And Analytics Will Impact E-Commerce In 2018

With 80% of internet users shopping online, e-commerce sales in the retail industry is projected to grow to $4.5 trillion by 2021. It thus goes without saying that e-commerce has become a game changer in recent times. Having so much data at hand, it makes it easier for business to apply some data analytics in e-commerce, to make high impact business decisions.

The impact of Big data analytics on ecommerce businesses is astounding. Let’s know and understand what big data really is, and acknowledge its impact.

What is Big Data?

Big data simply means significantly large datasets that are stored and analysed with the help of latest technology to provide meaningful insights to the business and help in decision making. Then, what is Ecommerce Analytics? Well, it is nothing but the process of collecting and analysing online purchase activities on your site or app. Online shopping Big Data can be used to scale up e-commerce and deliver enhanced services to its customers. There are heaps of ecommerce analytics case studies available online that will help you understand the impact of analytics on ecommerce.

What Is Big Data Analytics?

The process of examining, analysing and uncovering hidden data patterns from Big Data is known as Big Data Analytics. Using Big Data Analytics, you can uncover various critical pieces of information such as market trends, customer preferences and so on.  Businesses that incorporate Big Data Analytics tend to reap excellent business benefits. They can leverage more effective marketing campaigns, and discover opportunities for generating greater revenue. They find ways to improve their customer service delivery and make their operations more efficient. Big Data Analytics help enterprises to make more informed business decisions, with all the relevant data and data patterns at hand. Data scientists and predictive modellers, who analyse big data from varied and multiple sources use big data to come up with transactional data and other structured data.

Advantages of Big Data Analytics for Enterprises

Big Data Analytics allows companies to implement high-performance data mining, text mining, predictive analytics and other methods to drive information in order to make the best business decisions. This involves narrowing down big data to the information that’s most relevant to your business, and use it to make informed critical decisions. Big Data Analytics makes this a proactive approach, which transforms your business as it gives your decision makers the intelligence and the power to make decisions using the insights and the knowledge available, in real time. Using Big Data Analytics, enterprises can enhance their existing product lines, develop the kind of products that their customer base actually wants, improve customer retention, and gain an edge over their competition. Big Data Analytics also helps companies to respond rapidly to market changes, staying on top of critical customer shifts and various other metrics that impact their business. Enterprises utilizing Big Data

5 Ways Big Data and Analytics Will Alter the Face of E-commerce in 2018

Here are 5 ways Big Data and Analytics will alter the face of E-commerce in 2018:

1. Enhanced Shopping Pattern Analysis – Big Data Analytics is a great way of understanding customer’s shopping behavior to predict patterns that will help make better business strategies. Customer’s preferences, most popular brands or product that people seek, any product that people are seeing multiple times but is not offered by you, spikes in demands, what time of the year do customers shop more, so on and so forth can be assessed through big data analytics.
2. Effective Customer Service – The success of any e-commerce business depends on effective customer service. As per a survey conducted by Deloitte, 72% of companies believe they can use analytics reports to improve the customer experience. Big Data Analytics will therefore help in identifying major issues and resolving them and enhancing their processes so that customers enjoy doing transactions online Businesses then will definitely experience customer delight which will be a big boon to their growth.
3. Predict future operations plans – Big data analytics gives you a greater depth in understanding the overall operations of your business. Using data for ecommerce helps you manage, inventory, supply chain, forecasting demands, better pricing strategies and sales strategies. E-commerce will have the added advantage of flexibility in deciding the best ways of operational efficiency across various channels. There may be a scope to learn in this area through various big data ecommerce case studies too.
4. Increased focus on Micro Moments– “Micro Moments” is going to be the latest e-commerce trend and a hot topic of discussion in 2018. Customers generally seek quick actions – I want to go, I want to know, I want to buy, etc and they look at accessing what they want on their smartphones. Ecommerce retailers use these micro-moments to foresee customers tendencies and action patterns. Smartphone technologies help big data analytics to a large extent here.

5. Ease of online payments–According to some ecommerce analysis reports, approximately 7 out of 10 customers prefer mobile websites over mobile applications across devices and 50% of e-commerce sales are made via a mobile platform. Which only means that online payments need to be secure and safe for customers. Big data analytics helps in identifying fraud-related activities and any threats to its processes. Big data helps in having various payment options in one centralized platform thus making the payment process easy and convenient for customers.

Conclusion

We’ve taken a look at the 5 ways that Big Data Analytics can impact e-commerce in 2018. From understanding and analysing customer preferences and behavior, Big Data Analytics paves the way to better ways of providing enhanced customer service. Big Data Analytics even helps you understand your own company’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling you to come up with better product designs, better pricing strategies and better competitive strengths. To top it all, Big Data Analytics help the authorities identify payment frauds via websites and smartphone apps. This helps enterprises to funnel various payment options via a single centralized platform, to make payments more convenient.