The Internet is booming with 4.57 billion active users in April 2020. Out of these, 3.81 billion people are said to be active users on social media platforms.

The global retail sales worldwide reached 3535 million USD in 2019, as per Statista.

The people on the Internet are using different ways to reach for a variety of services and products. Likewise, online, as well as offline businesses, are aiming to make their digital presence and unfold novel opportunities for growth.

The ultimate goal of business owners is to understand the customer demographics and refine customer experience to grow their sales. In contrast to the traditional market, digitization gives an enormous scope of growth. Thankfully the technological development lets you collect a lot of data about customers, prospective customers, visitors, and your competitor businesses.

In this blog, we will be talking about big data and how big data science is helping ecommerce businesses.

To all the curious minds, let us explain what big data is? Big data is the huge amount of data sets that online businesses acquire from different platforms like a web store, social media, forums, communities, and different promotional tools. Big data science is the study of all the databases to make the optimum use of the content rightfully.

But, the data alone is of no good use. You will need the tools or ideas that can shape the data in an understandable user format.

As soon as big data comes in ecommerce, you will find the new term ‘ecommerce analytics.’ Ecommerce analytics talks about the analysis of big data and its transformation to an understandable format. Analytics involves the bar graphs, pie-charts, figures, factors, and how each factor is impacting the other. This inter-relatability and dependence of one factor over the other can improve your understanding of your business as well as the market.

With the combination of big data and e-commerce analytics, you can possibly understand everything about your target audience. Here’s what you can discover more:

• Shopping pattern analysis: Unlike traditional businesses, ecommerce gives you the option to track the interaction pattern of each visitor in your store. Slowly and gradually, you will come to an understanding the each of your customers can be like a case study, and big data gives you options to club them together and gain understanding about each one of them.You can track live user interaction and how some of the visitors check a lot of web pages while some of them leave instantly. You will be able to understand the user engagement time, product type, choices, best sellers, events witnessing a hike in sales, out of season products, what’s more, to be added, and those that need to be dumped.The better you will understand the shopping pattern of the customers, the more easily you will be able to target a lookalike audience. Marketing teams leverage this data to create their dedicated strategies on a monthly and quarterly basis.

• Refine your conversion funnel: When you create your goals, and your marketing team set the conversion funnel in Google Analytics, it is optimized for your target audience. But, the market is dynamic, and you have to keep updating things with time. Understanding the reports of your demographics, you can update your conversion funnel more precisely and accurately. It will help you in bringing quality traffic to your store.Further, you will be able to track the journey of your user base, type of product they are looking for. The cookies enabled on the browser will help you track the user activity on your website, previous session, total sessions, products viewed, checkout journey. Big data helps you analyze the journey of every user in the conversion funnel and evaluate the conversion rate of your store. In this way, you will be able to keep track of the stages at which customers are leaving your store, and if there seems to be an issue, you will be able to fix it soon, rather checking for it only if it gets major.

• Prediction of trends: Trend forecasting is definitely one of the most alluring benefits of big data sciences. Here comes the blend of all the data that’s acquired from social media platforms, groups, communities, from other businesses like yours, ad-media content, sentiment analysis, and all the conversations relating to your business niche, that’s going on the web. Leveraging the algorithm and analyzing it, the latest trends in your industry will be shared online.You can call it the guesswork for sure, but it’s one with facts and statistics. So, you can rely on them and add the best selling products to your inventory. When you know the probability of the products with higher chances of conversion, you will be able to set goals and prepare campaigns in advance. With the value-added to your present inventory, you will increase the chances of growth in the right direction and will be able to hit the market at the right time.

• Price optimization: When customers are shopping online, they surely check with the price of the product across different sites. After the research, analysis, and comparison; finally, the customer places the order on any of the websites. The overall price of the product counts, and it is known to change the decision of the customers more often. 30% of the customers are known to bear the losses just because of the failure of delivering the best price. Physically, it is impossible to keep track of each of the visitors and check with the reason that customer abandoned the cart or left your store.After understanding this behavior of customer patterns, ecommerce marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart enabled the feature of automated pricing. This feature lets you update the range of the product price for each of the products listed in the inventory. If some other business registered on these marketplaces lowers the price of the product, with the help of machine learning, the price of your products will automatically be replaced with the lowest rate. In this cutting edge competition, this proves to be one of the best ways to let your brand stand upfront and be the choice of customers.When it comes to your ecommerce store, with the help of big data and your understanding of the pricing of your products, you can automate pricing or manually optimize it as per the trends and market needs.

• Improvize your customer service: More than 45% of customers are known to abandon the products in their cart for some of the queries in their mind. By answering the common questions out of these, you can reduce the rate of cart abandonment. You can add the FAQ page on your store, for answering the common concerns of the customers. Further, you can integrate live chat software to your store to address customer concerns in real-time.The machine learning will upgrade the user handling experience of the chatbot, in your absence. You can share the link of basic redirecting pages or FAQs via chatbot. Also, you can offer live chat assistance to your customers in the working hours or even round-the-clock, later with the help of professionals. Your chatbot is also a source of adding more data that can help you understand the interaction pattern of users while connecting with the business. You can use those queries to add more questions to the users about your business. Also, you will be getting more ideas and suggestions for products and product categories that you are serving, or you must add.

• Track frauds & check frauds: Nearly 60% of customers prefer to make payment via one or other mode of digital payment. But, you can leave the other 40% of customers unattended as well. Not finding a suitable payment method is also one of the crucial reasons for customers leaving the store. As an ecommerce business, it’s your responsibility to ensure the security of each and every customer coming to your site and purchasing from your store.When you are busy handling different activities of your business, big data and other tools keep an eye on the finances and transactions through your store. Any malicious activity is reported immediately. You can save a budget cap on your store, to restrict the placement of orders above that order value. This is one of the best ways to avoid the activity of financial fraud. To add more customers to your store, it is advisable to keep the checkout page as simple and easy as possible.

Big data analytics can streamline a lot of business activities and reduce the burden of manually checking on the details. Further, we will be talking about ecommerce analytics in our next blog and how you can use that data to refine your customer’s experience on for your e-commerce store.