A man has to ask himself: Has technology gone too far? Well, nowadays everything is done by computers. You can find out about anything online. Everything is collected and stored on the internet. There are huge chunks of data floating around on it.
It can be tiring just digging through enormous piles of sometimes useless information. When you need to establish a pattern, dig into people’s interest, find out what they want, you have to search the social media, lose hours on google, etc. This is where Big Data kicks in. It helps us understand these patterns. In further text, you will find answers to all your questions in regard to Big Data Analytics and how it impacts eCommerce among other things.
How is this helping your business? Well, Big data lets you access this information, which is basically all neatly stored and ready to be analyzed. It provides much-valued insight and helps e-commerce business owners detect the patterns and behavior of online users i.e. their potential customers, which results in an increased influx of traffic and sales.
The most prominent manners in which Big data will impact eCommerce in the years to come are the following:
1. Customer analysis improvement
When you can understand how customers think and what they like, you can sell them your products easier. Big data allows eCommerce owners to better understand their customers’ desires, which products are trending online, how to make their products more popular and increase sales on their websites.
With this knowledge, you can cater to the shopper’s needs and be ahead of your competition. Social media has become a large factor in our modern lives. It not only affects the social aspects of human life, but it also impacts business. Not only business owners can use it for marketing, but it can also be used for analysis and sales improvement purposes.
In 2018, big data analytics will play a huge factor in sales, advertisement, product placement, website optimization, product selection and more.
2. The focus on shopper satisfaction
With a better understanding of customers’ needs and concerns comes better service, ergo satisfaction of customers increases and the final result are better sales results. Multi-vendoreCommerce, like every other business, relies on customer happiness. A happy customer equals a better reputation of a company, resulting in increased sales and traffic on your website.
So, how do you make a customer happy? Easy, put yourself in their shoes. Do you like a polite and available customer support? Of course, you do. Just like everyone else.
Can you count the times customer service agent was rude, didn’t reply timely or simply didn’t seem to care about the concerns you have regarding their product? How did that make you feel? You didn’t want to ever buy their product again, did you?. This is the worst impression a company wants to leave on their customer because it directly impacts the decrease in the number of your customers and their satisfaction levels.
Big data provides statistics on these levels, as well as it improves monitoring. What this does is basically help you discover a problem before it becomes too late. If you resolve them timely, they won’t become an obstacle and obstruct your business.
3. Safe and fluent online payments
Above all, big data offers a centralized platform for all the payment functions. Not only it makes the lives of customers easy, but also it prevents fraud, which is very common in any online transactions. Big data allows detection of fraud and presents methods of risk identification and solutions to these risks.
Analysis of data provides an increase in sales for multi-vendor eCommerce companies by cross-selling, thanks to improved customer understanding. Customer data is validated through the generation of push notifications.
4. Mobile commerce improvement
The increase of smartphone usage in modern society is simply put enormous. Recent research shows that PCs are a dying breed. Laptops, notepads and mobile phones are the future.
Mobile technology is providing big data with multiple sources for information gathering, and it makes it easier to see what is trending in today’s society. Always a pioneer, Google is giving a clear advantage to websites which allow users access on their mobiles. The brands that do not provide mobile-friendly websites are about to see a big decrease in their sales due to low traffic on their domains.
5. Progression of VR in the retail world
Virtual reality and big data are intertwined as they are at the top of modern tech achievements of humanity, which makes their combined use even more effective. These two are completely remodeling e-commerce. They offer shoppers to do everything online without ever leaving their home. On the other hand, to business owners, they give provide better marketing and brand recognition.
The statistics collected by big data help improve develop and change the business strategy, while humans can just sit back and let computers do the work for them. In the future, people will surely rely on technology more and more for just about anything, especially for commerce. In ten years’ time, we will see a huge decrease in physical shops around the world, as it is just more profitable and cost-effective to set up an eCommerce.
Big data already has a big impact on eCommerce, and it will only get bigger and bigger by the day. Online stores which use it are doing business easier and better than ever. Big data gives them instruments to improve all aspects of their work and maintain customer satisfaction at all times.
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Author: Nick Brown
Nick is a blogger and a marketing expert currently engaged on projects for Media Gurus, an Australian business, and marketing resource. He is an aspiring street artist and does Audio/Video editing as a hobby.
