5 Ways Big Data Is Helping E-commerce And Physical Businesses
E-commerce is a revolutionary change, disrupting the retail market. It was believed that e-commerce is going to shut all physical stores. It is proved that e-commerce has brought many advantages, to both businesses and customers. In 2016, the retail industry solely in the US achieved sales of 322.17 billion dollars. The percentage of online shoppers has increased significantly.
But everything has its flaws. E-commerce also has some downsides. Still, many shoppers are afraid of shopping online. 80% of these buyers give quality reasons. Most buyers do not like to pay before they receive the product. Also, the online payment trust issue is another reason.
Omnichannel and Big data
Omnichannel is a recent hot topic that indicates the integration of distribution, transmission, and communication channels in the backend. In common parlance, omnichannel means having both physical and e-commerce stores.
For example, a salesperson in a retail store can look up a customer’s history just like an e-commerce executive. This is called omnichannel usage. Omnichannel involves end-users (or consumers) at all stages. Multichannel and omnichannel are two different terms, most retailers are multichannel, but very few are truly omnichannel.
The key difference between multi and omnichannel is how customer experience is joined up across those channels. Omnichannel joins the customers’ touchpoint together so that whatever journey the customer chooses (website, mobile, social media, phone, in-store), the experience is consistent and unified. And an effective omnichannel strategy is much needed big data. Merging e-commerce and retail is a great way to optimize sales. Brands that have tried this have experienced a significant increase in sales. Therefore, it is critical to understand What is big data analytics?
How big data benefit omnichannel
Stores operations
Big data helps organizations gather information including product requirements, and help all brands provide all products and services to their customers. Just like how e-commerce sites perform excellent operations, retail stores can also deliver the same quality.
Physical stores can provide more personalized services to customers by looking at the previous data. Stores can easily analyze a customer’s purchase history and behaviors to make timely precise decisions.
Marketing
Big data analytics is primarily used for marketing purposes since it provides information about customers, that helps generate insights about what exactly customers want. It is used to create an effective buyer’s persona. The stores can target the right audience in the right way.
For instance, Nike wants to open new stores at two locations, one neighborhood with the younger demographic and one with a more athletic demographic. Therefore, each store in each neighborhood should have different approaches to attract the target audience, how each section is decorated and put out also affects the behavior of the current and potential customers, and more importantly, the marketing strategy is also different from one to another. Big data helps stores understand which medium is suitable for their target audience.
Supply chain
The biggest challenge of any business, especially retail and e-commerce store is the large-scale production of products. It is essential to understand the number of products that need to be manufactured and kept in stock. Most retailers or online stores have stocks as per the demand; unfortunately, the retail industry is unpredictable, there is no proper equation to calculate the exact needs. Customers always changing due to media trends. There may be a sudden demand for any product that is purple simply because it was mentioned in some tabloids that purple is the 2020 trendy color.
Big data provides valuable information about product demand since these data are generated by everyone (can be you, or your family, or your friends, etc); data analysts can look at these data to predict the current trends and determine which products should be extra stored.
Note: With new technologies like AI and Machine Learning, the bots can help data analysts predict the current trend with little to no error.
Better customer experience
As every business owner knows, good relationships with customers are the priority since it determines the success of one business. And today, everyone is looking for personalized services. Just like e-commerce websites, traditional stores can also deliver a great customer experience by performing personalized customer service. Real stores can send personalized notifications about one customer’s favorite brands or products. Also, the salesperson can get real-time user data and offer good services when a customer walks into one store according to their purchase history.
Overall performance
Big data can help improve the physical stores’ overall performance since they can use big data to improve their marketing strategies, sales, promotions, and more importantly, customer experience. Since big data combined with AI can make accurate predictions, stores can deal with business risks.
Conclusion
Big data analytics surely brings benefits to any business, especially for e-commerce and physical retailer. Adopting big data analytics technology isn’t hard, with the right guidance, anyone can win in this technology marathon.
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