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Boosted by the pandemic, online sales have scaled new heights. Even avenues like online grocery delivery which weren’t that popular earlier have seen high growth, led by companies like Amazon Fresh and Instacart. Food delivery platforms like Doordash saw their revenue multiply as people decided to stay in and order food online. The growth of many new eCommerce stores with each operating in a certain niche has only made the competition fiercer and raised the stakes higher. In such a wrestling match, eCommerce data analytics is the only thing that can give companies an upper hand. Data needs to be collected, processed and stored in a format preferably cloud, such that multiple departments can use it for better market analysis, understanding customers and accordingly making data-backed decisions.
Fix warehousing problems and improve overall delivery efficiency
Whether you are delivering food or clothes or a laptop, individuals are likely to prefer platforms that have short delivery timelines. Gone are the days when one could wait weeks for online platforms to deliver products. With growing competition, companies like Amazon are providing guaranteed same-day or next-day deliveries at an extra cost. The company has even started its very own cargo airlines in an attempt to control a greater part of its delivery chain.
While not all companies can follow suit, ecommerce data analytics can help companies keep up with the demands for products in different locations. It will mainly help them decide the quantity of each product that needs to be stocked in different warehouses. These figures would get updated frequently based on real-time as well as historical data. Applying data analytics in supply chain management can help your customers get products faster and also enable you to cut costs.
Ensure customer satisfaction and improve brand image
Any individual who is aggrieved with a company’s products goes and rambles on social media platforms. Usually, the person would even tag the company if they have a social media presence or at least mention its name, the product, and sometimes even the famous faces of the company. For example, individuals having trouble with their Teslas were seen putting up tweets tagging the company and Musk.
What makes companies stand out is when they analyse such mentions and tags in real time using ecommerce datasets, separate the actionable posts and then work on fixing the issues immediately. While any product or service may face issues in its lifespan, such interactions with users help improve customer trust in the company name. Given the number of social media websites today and the many ways in which an individual may refer to a company, data analytics is the only way to work on this problem. You can even find positive mentions and use them to showcase your customer satisfaction metrics.
Increase organic traffic to your website
Who does not love organic traffic to their website? Even better if they result in conversions! Using SEO tools as well as data analytics, you can figure out the best content to add to your website to attract more organic traffic. These can be–
- Blog posts related to the industry that your company operates in.
- More content on each product page containing attributes, descriptions, videos, images and how-to operate tutorials.
- More descriptive content with vital information on landing pages.
- Relevant banners that would attract more customers.
Improve customer retention
Getting new customers to your website is hard. Keeping them and converting them to repeat customers who use your website repeatedly is harder. A few ways of doing this–
- Find related products or accessories based on what was bought by the customer the first time. Use data analytics to figure out what was bought along with the same items by other customers. Share those with the individual along with the prices.
- In case the user searched for certain products which were missing, notify him as soon as the item or close alternatives become available.
- Once a user shops a few times, try finding trends and identifying his shopping patterns. A simple example may be a person buying a shampoo bottle every month. Send him a notification a few days before when he is supposed to be placing an order.
These are just some examples in which data analytics can be used to improve customer retention. The truth is, as your company grows, you will need to analyse both purchase data as well as customer actions and behaviour on your website to figure out what improvements you can make to ensure customers find your website more user-friendly and keep using it irrespective of price differences.
Figure out pain points and improve conversion rates
Users stop using the services of a company due to specific bottlenecks. These are usually not about the quality of the product or its price but other factors such as–
- Delayed shipping.
- Delivery of wrong products.
- Non-user-friendly return or exchange options.
- Inaccurate descriptions on product pages.
- No response to user complaints.
The best way to improve conversion rates is to figure out the problems faced by individuals. In the initial phase, this may even require you to contact those who don’t make a purchase after checking out multiple products. A seamless and user-friendly experience is likely to get you free marketing. Some of the best companies in the world have a minimal or even zero marketing budgets. Finding out the pain points may be difficult if you take a manual approach given the number of daily orders and the numerous customers who might be facing issues. An automated data collection approach followed by a data analytics engine can crack the problem.
While we explained just 5 ways in which you can use data to boost your eCommerce business, as your company grows and new data sources are added to your arsenal, you will continue using them in many new ways. Unless this is done, there will be data lying on the table– data that others will use and likely leave you behind in the race.
