As an international industry, eCommerce has consistently grown over the last decade and shows absolutely no sign of slowing down anytime soon. At present, over 4.2 trillion USD dollars are spent on eCommerce each year throughout the world, with much of that cash flow being put back into expanding the product offerings of certain companies.

One of the most common investments for modern businesses is in big data, with 97.2% of companies currently investing in this industry. The arrival of big data to eCommerce has been a turning point for this industry, allowing business owners to more effectively strategize for the future, understand the market as a whole, and design their stores around exactly what their customers want.

In this age of mass data production, with billions of data points being created every single day, the eCommerce industry is rapidly changing to keep up with progress. In this article, we’ll turn to the fusion between eCommerce and big data, demonstrating exactly how the influence of data is beginning to influence almost every aspect of this field.

We’ll be covering:

• Data-driven marketing within eCommerce
• Predicting future trends
• Streamlined customer experience

Let’s get right into it. 

Data-Driven Marketing

Data-driven marketing is the practice of using data generated online to then change the targets or approaches that a business will use when marketing its products.

A great example of this is when a company finds out what its core demographic is in terms of age, gender, location, or other core factors, and then slightly changes its marketing tactics to accommodate these people.

Instead of building marketing campaigns based on assumptions or past campaigns, marketing teams can turn to data to get a real insight into who their customers are and what they’re looking for. The arrival of big data, alongside its collection and analysis, has allowed companies to know a great deal more about the audience they’re creating for. With this, they’re able to launch much more specific and personalized campaigns.

Considering the vast majority of consumers enjoy when content is personalized to them, this also results in a higher click-through rate from advertisements, alongside a better conversion rate for those that land on an eCommerce website.

Now big data is here, especially when examining its huge impact on marketing in this industry, it’s unlikely to disappear anytime soon, with data being integral to the recent success of eCommerce marketing. 

Predicting Future Trends

Another leading use case of big data within eCommerce is mass analysis of the direction of specific markets. With AI analysis tools, millions of disparate data points can be simultaneously considered, allowing business analysts to conduct much more expansive and accurate research for the companies they work for.

By using external industry data, businesses are able to trace the direction of certain movements within the market as a whole. For example, extrapolating from huge data samples, analysts could suggest which particular products are currently gaining favor in the market as a whole, based on a range of different factors.

In this specific example, analysts could take figures from the manufacturing industry, tracing spikes in production and mapping them out to explain the rise in popularity of a certain product. Alongside understanding current trends, this allows businesses to stay ahead of what is currently coming into fashion in the world of eCommerce.

One of the most advanced forms of big data analysis uses corpus linguistics to comb through the total number of mentions of a specific phrase or product in spaces like social media. With this bulk analysis, companies can see when products become more popular in these spaces, then adjust their own manufacturing plans to be prepared for the future. 

The incorporation of big data into prediction and planning for the future allows eCommerce businesses to be much more efficient when it comes to production.

Streamlined Customer Experience Through Mass Data Collection

Alongside external data sets, internal webpages for an eCommerce business are treasure troves of information to conduct analysis upon. By tracking where users tend to exit off a website, eCommerce business owners are able to see exactly where their customer experience falters.

With this in mind, they can then go about changing the form of their site to remove what’s causing people to leave, or directing them in different directions down the sales funnel. Whenever a user enters an eCommerce website, all of their data, including everything from personal information and location to where they go on the site and how long they spend there, is tracked.

This information is then fed into internal data warehouses, where it is stored until analysts then put it to work to draw certain conclusions. By storing months, or even years’ worth of customer data in these internal data warehouses, companies are able to build up huge repositories of knowledge for themselves to rely on.

Many cloud data warehouse companies have arisen over the past decade to facilitate the construction of these data pools, with many offering a range of additional features that help to make the data pipeline as efficient as possible.

For example, one needs only to look at the comparison of Druid vs Snowflake, two leading cloud data warehouses, to see a whole host of integration and scalability tools. With this in mind, a business can continuously collect data, then use it to reflect on their current user experience.

This data collected at scale allows companies to understand themselves better, helping them to continuously work toward developing better websites with much more accessible and friendly layouts for their customers. Without the power of mass data analysis, this wouldn’t be possible, with the number of samples being the true power that drives the intersection of these industries. 

Final Thoughts

Big data has touched industries around the world, its influx of insight and logic providing much-needed support to fields that can be fairly uncertain at times. eCommerce, an industry that requires businesses to constantly compete for the attention of their customers, stay ahead of trends, and adapt quickly to new circumstances, is the perfect candidate for partnering with big data.

Alongside this, considering that eCommerce is all run online, the gathering of data is easier than ever, making this a natural point of connection between these two fields. Now that big data has begun to be used across eCommerce, its effects have been enormous, touching everything from marketing and UX design to sales practices and trend prediction.

When it comes to eCommerce, big data is making waves – and will continue doing so long into the future.