With a wide range of social media websites and apps such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, many online retailers are creating WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups/pages, Instagram pages for solidifying their online presence. This only means that eCommerce sales, especially in the retail industry are projected to grow by 2021. Having a lot of data at hand makes it easier for businesses to apply customer data analytics in eCommerce, to make a high impact on business decisions.
The impact of Big data analytics on eCommerce businesses is astounding.
5 Ways Big Data and Analytics Will Alter the Face of E-commerce in 2020
Enhanced Shopping Pattern Analysis
Big Data Analytics is a powerful way of understanding a customer’s shopping behavior to predict patterns that will help make better marketing strategies. Customer preferences, most popular brands or products that prospects seek, any product that people are seeing multiple times but is not offered by you, hikes in demands, what time of the year do customers shop more, so on and so forth can be assessed through big data analytics.
Effective Customer Service
The success of any eCommerce business depends on effective customer service. As per a survey by Deloitte, 72% of companies believe they can use customer analytics reports to improve the customer experience. Big Data Analytics will, therefore, help in identifying major issues and help in resolving them and enhancing the processes so that customers enjoy doing transactions online. Businesses then will definitely experience customer delight which will be a big boon to their growth.
Predict future operations plans
Big data analytics gives you greater depth in understanding the overall operations of your business. Using eCommerce analytics 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.
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.
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. This 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.
Personalization 