Only collecting large amounts of data from eCommerce websites would not give you the competitive edge. You also need to analyze it to gather crucial insights. That’s where big data comes into the picture.
Helping companies understand their customers in context of the current market, Big Data has a significant impact on eCommerce. In this blog, we’ll discuss its six crucial use cases. Let’s begin:
Six Ways Big Data is Revolutionizing the eCommerce Industry
Discover the transformative power of big data through these six use cases and learn why you or the eCommerce web development agency you hired should leverage it on your eCommerce website:
1. Offering the Best Shopping Experience
Poor shopping experience is one of the key reasons why customers abandon a shopping cart mid way. When they feel unwelcome on an eCommerce website, get product recommendations they don’t need, or find the website too complicated – they quickly jump ship.
Big data prevents this from happening by giving you a complete picture into customers’ mindset, ensuring you can easily predict their behavior and suggest products they need. As a result, only a few customers abandon the shopping cart, leading to more conversions and hence higher revenue.
For example, Lenovo uses big data to improve customer experience. They collected data sets from various touch points and used real-time predictive analytics to anticipate customer behavior. As a result, they could significantly refine the shopping experience of consumers and achieve an 11% increase in revenue per unit.
2. Big Data Prevents Scams & Fraudulent Activities
eCommerce websites suffer heavy losses (financial setbacks, loss of reputation, costly lawsuits) because of scams and fraudulent activities. To prevent it and offer a highly efficient shopping experience to customers, you need to ensure that their payments are secure.
With Big data, you can analyze suspicious patterns on your eCommerce website, such as multiple different purchases from the same credit card within a short timeframe or multiple payment requests from the same IP address. This way, you can get alerted on time and prevent a scam even before it happens.
3. Big Data Helps in Cultivating a More Personalized Experience
86% of consumers say that personalization plays a crucial role in their buying decisions. Especially, the millennial buyers expect to receive personalized product suggestions to consider buying a product.
Big data analytics helps you offer personalized customer experience by offering an all-round view of your customers. It lets you segment customers based on their gender, age, location, and social media presence. This way, you can send them emails with custom discounts, use different marketing strategies and communication for different target audiences, and launch campaigns tailed to each customer’s specific requirements.
Amazon uses big data to offer personalized shopping experiences. It suggests products to customers based on their buying behavior, preferences, and purchase history. You can also borrow a trick or two from them to enhance the customer experience on your website.
4. Big Data Helps You Optimize Pricing for Increased Sales
Customers don’t just care about loyalty programs, secure payments, and seamless shopping experiences. They also consider how much they’re saving while buying a product. Many would compare prices on multiple platforms before deciding whether to buy a product from you or not. That’s why you must keep the price on your eCommerce website both lucrative and profitable.
Big Data analytics analyzes the purchase history, preferences, and demographics of your customers to aid your product pricing strategy. It also suggests long-standing loyal customers who can offer early access to sales or special discounts.
A popular example of leveraging big data to optimize its pricing is Amazon. It uses big data to gain insight into customer behavior and adjust product prices based on demand.
5. Big Data Helps You Foster Loyalty with Exceptional Customer Service
According to the stats, loyal customers spend 67% more than the ones who just associated with your brand. Hence, it’s essential to pay as much attention towards retaining existing customers as retaining new ones.
Big Data can help you identify gaps in product delivery, customer satisfaction, and brand perception on social media. This way, you can identify the hurdles that prevent your customers from buying from you and how you can retain them. This approach reduces the churn rate and increases sales on your online store.
Amazon retains existing customers by analyzing customer behavior and purchase history to suggest products they like. They also enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty through exciting deals, cashback offers, and competitive pricing. This strategy has helped them reduce customer churn and increase conversions on their website significantly. As a result, they’re more successful in retaining their existing customers than their peers.
6. You Can Significantly Boost Your Sales Using Big Data
Big data lets you personalize your product recommendations and coupons to fit customer requirements. It will lead to a better customer experience and hence more sales.
Also, you can use big data to run precise marketing campaigns that strike a chord with the customers, entice customers with exciting redeemable coupons, or gentle reminders that they have products lying in their cart. It leads to more conversions and hence an increased revenue.
Domino’s Pizza used big data to significantly increase their sales. Their AnyWare platform allows customers to order pizzas via smartwatches, TVs, car entertainment systems, and social media platforms. The data gathered from these sources is a goldmine of customer information. Although, it was too scattered to be leveraged for competitive advantage.
That’s why they used a big data platform to integrate information from 85000 structured and unstructured data sources across all the channels. Now, they have a single, trusted source of truth they can refer to improve their business operations. It has helped them significantly enhance their business performance and bring in more sales through personalized campaigns.
In Conclusion,
To survive the competition and stay afloat, you have no option but to leverage big data analytics to optimize your online store. It can help you anticipate market shifts and changing customer preferences, ensuring your business always remains relevant.
So, don’t miss out on the big data gold rush. Learn and put it into practice before it’s too late. If you’re wondering where to start, many cloud-based big data analytics tools are available. You can also take help from big data analytics experts. They can review your online store and suggest suitable improvements to grow your business. Best of luck!
