10 Benefits Of Analytics for the eCommerce Industry

1. Track Shopper’s Buying Journey 

From casual browsing to placing orders, the customer journey you create for your eCommerce business is how you create awareness about your product, service, or brand.

Businesses, through eCommerce analytics, can track their customer’s journey and map out motivation, identify customer needs, understand demand, and proactively improve the experience for new and existing customers.

A shopper’s journey begins once they become aware of your product, this could be a result of marketing or just luck. Creating an impact from the start to increase your buyer’s retention rate and working on feedback is how businesses can attract customers and convert them into online sales. 

A shopper’s buying journey is a 5 step process

1. Awareness.
2. Consideration.
3. Acquisition.
4. Retention.
5. Advocacy.

By using insights on shoppers’ information, businesses understand the preference of a particular customer, products they have viewed, time spent on each product, and understand what they like most, and this information can go to marketing for further processing.

2. Personalized Experience for Every Customer

With trends in the eCommerce industry shifting to becoming more customer-centric, businesses today depend highly on data to understand their customers. Today 87% of customers prefer stores offering a personalized experience, creating strategies to send customized emails, offering discounts or sharing discount codes and offers with repeating customers, and showing targeted ads to relevant people to generate revenue in a higher volume. 

They can create a personalized experience for customers by following insights:

• Using methods to know their past and recent purchases for existing customers and through support calls and forms
• Use financial transactions of customers and their purchasing trends
• Social media behavior and ongoing activities of customers
• Data extracted from all external surveys

Analytics can greatly support seeing the behavior of new and existing users, where they spend the most time on, and what product they are viewing most to create a personalized experience and convert all potential customers.

With a personalized experience, they can retain customers using analytics and insights and recommend relevant products to customers based on current trends and shopping history.

3. Improved Buyer Sentiment Analysis

Covid-19 Pandemic has changed how businesses operate. Over 64% of companies have permanently changed their organization’s strategy seeing a shift in their buyer’s sentiments.

Sentiment analysis provides relevant, valuable information in decision-making for all eCommerce businesses. With a shift in how buyers respond and their online presence, eCommerce analytics can help know buyers’ sentiments on products, UI, and UX through their feedback, reviews, and ratings.

Understanding buyer sentiments is a key to making your business a success. According to experts’ estimates, eCommerce companies lose over $10 million every year as they fail to capitalize on data, including emails, chat, social media, reviews on Google, and other social platforms.

All tech-savvy companies embrace data to analyze their buyer sentiments. Understanding data helps companies improve buyer experience and get an edge over competitors through timely responses, enhanced services, buyer retention, and building an overall positive brand image. 

Through eCommerce analytics, businesses can also stay updated with market trends and customer sentiments within the industry to improve their overall experience.

4. Better Customer Service

Have you ever liked a product online and contacted their customer support to find out if it is available? The sooner you find out, the faster you’ll click on “place your order.” With excellent customer service, you convert your customers into your brand ambassadors. Understanding how customers react to certain situations and products your business offers helps address and improve customer retention rates with better service.

Offering customers with better service is not exactly a hidden treasure. If done right, customer service can turn any lead into a conversion. eCommerce businesses can improve customer experience through survey forms and questionnaires and quickly address their customers’ queries.

5. Price Optimization

Pricing is another critical factor to drive your eCommerce business. Price optimization allows companies to find the right price for their products and services and make informed decisions using market data and customer insights. Analytics will enable businesses to see how customers react to a particular price change, their preferences, and qualitative data to see trends.

Like any other industry, an increase in demand plays a crucial role in determining prices for eCommerce businesses. Product availability and competitors are essential in optimizing costs like any other business. With predictive analysis, inflation rate, customer demand, you can analyze pricing trends and maximize profit accordingly. Price optimization also helps in increased sales on all levels of global eCommerce giants. 

6. Demand Forecasting 

Demand forecasting can benefit small and large-scale eCommerce businesses to plan stock and monitor future demand for your online products. In market forecasting, it is best to use historical data and previous trends to analyze the need for your products.

Big data can help eCommerce giants, and medium enterprises estimate future stock based on experience, see which month the sales are higher, and plan marketing campaigns and activities ahead of time.

As digital technologies transform, businesses can forecast demand using data to capitalize on early and win big time. Forecasting provides insights and confidence to companies to perform at their best. Enabling them to prepare a budget ahead, identify seasonal trends and social media trends, develop a pricing strategy and minimize dead stock to reduce storage cost and increase awareness on lesser product wastages. 

7. Helps to build a robust supply chain 

In these digital times where shopping has transformed, customers choose the quality at affordable prices and hassle-free experience, and online shopping offers these. Pandemic has led to the emergence of many eCommerce businesses globally. Building a robust supply chain is how you can ensure the success of your eCommerce business. You can even outsource this process to third-party supply chain facilitators. 

When people choose contact-free timely deliveries, it is a crucial responsibility for businesses to offer feature options of Live Tracking of their products (warehouse to your doorstep) and stay updated about your product’s location anytime. The data can help generate insights into the overall customer experience. The robust supply chain can help in Last-Mile Delivery to customers where they can get their ordered products at an affordable price and at the desired time to create a smooth delivery experience. 

8. Analyze Information to Detect Fraud

The level of Fraud comes in every business. In eCommerce, according to statistics, companies were expected to lose 20 billion US dollars to online payment frauds in 2021. With emerging as a new distribution channel for consumers to shop, the risk increases gradually and is a significant concern for businesses worldwide. With third-party sellers and vendors, the chance of getting wrong items delivered and receiving low-quality or damaged products is a big turn-off for consumer giants. With analytics, the algorithms can look out for any repetitive behavior by customers and vendors and take immediate action to avoid the risk of Fraud. 

9. Forecast inventory for the next season 

Planning is one of the essential factors in forecasting inventory. Many eCommerce giants address this by accurately predicting upcoming market demand for the next season.

Knowing what customers need and keeping inventory checked helps create accuracy and fulfill customer demand. Data aids in creating demand for existing products, and it is difficult to predict and forecast inventory with new products. Inventory forecasting tools help in automation for reordering, knowing which set of customers are buying a particular product multiple times during discounts and sales, and using this information to group one or more products to create demand for slow-moving items in your store.

If your forecasting is precise, you have an added advantage in:

• manufacturing lead time for your high demand products ahead of time
• improving turnaround time to fulfill orders
• ability to cater to increased demands on special occasions (Christmas, Eid, Black Fridays)

 In the eCommerce industry, analytics become helpful in determining which stock items should continue and what can go on sale after the season ends. 

10. Ensure your marketing is laser-focused

Data analytics tools can provide eCommerce companies with measuring their marketing campaigns’ success. Looking at data and numbers, they can improve their decision-making process, gain omnichannel traction, and create holistic and customized marketing campaigns for businesses to build and generate sales. 

Analytics can provide businesses information with:

• customer niche for marketing
• strategy for advertisement
• budget planning for specific products
• engagement time of customers on the website
• ROI on paid, and owned channels
• promotional effectiveness on all digital channels

Consumers are the drive of any business’s success. Deloitte International’s research shows that marketing data helps companies improve their effectiveness by 49% and make better decisions. When it comes to eCommerce, measuring and reporting performance is a challenge. Still, with insights, you can measure the effectiveness of campaigns and how eCommerce is performing as a channel itself. These can help businesses tailor their marketing strategy to attain optimum results. Ascend analytics drive data from your marketing results and share practical ways to increase your profits and business performance. These business intelligence solutions create a unique experience for all customers.