A Definitive Guide on How Business Intelligence Can Be Very Useful for Your E-commerce Business
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Business organizations adopt analytics tools and methods for many reasons. Business intelligence (BI) services constitute of all of those tools and practices that are necessary for decision-making. All in all, the objective of business intelligence services is to collect and analyze the data for deriving insights that can come in handy as actionable intelligence. Despite being a niche sector, business intelligence services are beneficial for a variety of industries. The tools and techniques possessed by BI software/services help organizations work smarter, not harder. Businesses can benefit from such data and make smarter decisions. For example, your business might generate a lot of location-based data. Instead of looking at raw numbers, you could map out addresses from excel and create a custom visualization in the form of a map to look at your data from a different perspective. BI services are widely being accepted by the businesses on a global level due to high demand for automated data and support. This has encouraged the industry to grow at a rapid pace and sustain the growth.
The global business intelligence market is growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.6 percent and it is expected to achieve a market value of $22.8 billion from current $18.3 billion by 2020. APAC is considered to be the next big market due to projected high market growth in the next 5 years whereas North America and Europe are high maturity markets. A personalized and self-service business, Data as a Service (DaaS), and big data analysis are some major growth drivers in the global BI market. With the help and advent of online platforms such as Cloud, mobile technology and social BI solutions, the market is also expanding in regions such as Japan, LATAM, and MEA.
Benefits of Business Intelligence for E-Commerce Business:
BI uses several strategies and technologies for providing best results to a business. It helps businesses to store raw data and analyze it at the times decision making. This helps the organization in the long run as the businesses can remain informed and make better decisions that would not be as easy without the BI assistance. This is especially true in the case of businesses that are dynamic in nature such as ecommerce. Here is how BI can help ecommerce businesses.
Information about the Industry: Data that is accurate and available at the right times is the key to success in an ecommerce business. BI service providers incorporate information and data metrics which is critical for the health of an ecommerce business. Such a comprehensive approach may aid in the decision making by informing the decision makers about the key aspects such as top performers, margin and trend analysis, marketing insights, inventory reports, and competitive analysis.
Sales Insights: BI can help in increasing sales by offering the insights such as product demand, buying trends, and more. Such insights can be quite useful in terms of determining product prices, promotional strategies such as discounts/cashbacks, and related strategies. Such an approach can also help in evaluating profitable opportunities for the business and formulate new strategies. This works for both online and offline prospects as he key personnel can also analyze traffic during seasons.
Customer Retention: Retaining customers is important for any business and it becomes vital for ecommerce businesses. This is because developing and converting new customers is always more expensive. BI can offer insights about the reasons that compelled the customers to leave or what is compelling them to keep buying from your website. The insights can include information about late shipments, wrong deliveries, delivery person’s behavior, complaints, and customer reviews. All of this leads to better customer retention and satisfaction.
Better Decision Making: This is the core purpose of BI tools and services is to help organizations make better decisions. Many market studies suggest that decisions that are based on relevant data have more chances of getting the desired outcomes than the ones based on simple intuition or with limited knowledge. BI can offer better evaluation of data that can help generate reports that can be amazingly helpful in determining aspects such as pricing models and more.
Merchandise and Inventory Management: BI tools can help a business show the right products at the right time. The information on aspects such as product performance and promotion is derived from customer analysis which is a part of the BI integration and operation. BI tools can help key personnel optimize inventories, replenish stocks, and track inventory movement. This can help an organization prepare for future demands as well.
Marketing Analysis: Capable BI tools can help you understand how to channelize your marketing efforts for optimum performance and better output. This may help in deterring the exact time for promoting your efforts and strategies.
The global BI market is growing sustainably with a steady speed. Its penetration in the emerging regions such as APAC is also increasing which shows its demand in the developing economies. Although BI was considered an expensive resource in the past decade, it has acquired its due significance in the modern times.
