eCommerce has plenty of opportunities, but it also means you face lots of competition. So you’ll need to make some savvy strategic decisions to stay ahead of the pack.
Behind the scenes, you can shift the landscape through data. Data, when used in the right way, can be a goldmine.
This article explores what eCommerce business intelligence means in the modern world. We’ll explain how to develop strategies to grow your business and what intelligence tools will help you get there.
Part 1: eCommerce Business Intelligence Strategies
If you want to use business intelligence to your advantage in eCommerce, you need an action plan. In this section, we’ll delve into the best tried-and-tested strategies.
Determine Your Metrics
There is one strategy that provides the foundation for all your eCommerce intelligence. It’s something you must do from the start: Identify the metrics that matter most to your organization.
Modern eCommerce analytics tools have the power to capture thousands of data points. Yet you may only need a small percentage of these to impact your business meaningfully.
Focus on the metrics that will help you measure performance and decision-making. For an eCommerce business, that will include things like:
- Customer behavior
- Revenue
- Product sales
- Promotional activity
- Website traffic, bounce rates, and conversion rates
- Average order value
- Lifetime customer value
Choosing the right metrics from the start will help you optimize your efforts. It will make it easier to set up the correct reports. Plus, it will stop you from becoming overwhelmed by too much information.
Using Analytics to Understand Your Customers’ Needs
Analytics on your customers is some of the most valuable data you capture. When creating a strategy for your business intelligence, consider how to leverage it.
That means knowing how to collect, analyze and apply each customer data you own. When you do this, it can reveal information you can use to your advantage in eCommerce.
It will tell you about your customer’s buying habits, preferences, and behaviors. What this means is that you can create tailored promotions and marketing material.
It will help you create offers that resonate better with your customer.
Plus, understanding customer data more granularly will help you personalize your approach. You can tailor your eCommerce platform based on the person browsing your shop.
Creating an Inventory Management Strategy
You should consider how you’ll use business intelligence to shape your inventory management.
With eCommerce, this strategy will ensure you have the right products available at the right time. You can use analytics to monitor seasons and sales trends. And you can use buyers’ behavior to forecast product demand.
That will put your business in a stronger position, offering plenty of stock availability and fast shipping.
Creating a Pricing Strategy
Business intelligence will give you valuable information on how to price your products. You can analyze buying patterns as well as track customer pricing. You can also explore the supply side.
For example, you can monitor changes in what you pay for goods and shipping. That can shape future product pricing before it impacts your profit margin.
At its most advanced level, modern business intelligence can adjust prices in real-time based on many factors. This will help you optimize revenue, retain customers, and help you to grow.
Optimizing Your Web Presence
Website data will be a central part of your business intelligence. It will tell a comprehensive story about how your eCommerce website performs.
You’ll get data like traffic times, bounce rates, popular pages, exit pages, and conversion rates. This information will help you deliver a better website that meets your business objectives.
That might be something simple like getting people to stick when they land a flagship product page. Or it could be as involved as a complete website overhaul.
Either way, your business intelligence will help you shape your website strategy. So always think about what web data you need to track.
Customer Retention Strategy
Business intelligence can also help shape your customer retention strategy. You can analyze data relating to how your existing approaches have fared, such as loyalty programs.
With additional insights into customer behavior, you can develop new, impactful ways to keep hold of customers. Moreover, with the right business intelligence, you can even look at how to boost that all-important customer lifetime value.
Part 2: Tools for eCommerce Business Intelligence
By now, you should have a picture of the power business intelligence can offer your business. When used in conjunction with the right strategies, it can help transform any eCommerce business.
To do that, you’ll need the right tools. Here, we’ve provided a breakdown of some market-leading business intelligence software you should know.
Tableau
Tableau is a leading player in the business intelligence field. It has a user-friendly interface, a welcome feature when dealing with vast data.
You’ll find plenty of helpful visual representations of your business intelligence. You can create and customize the dashboards to present your desired information.
It will help you spot trends and patterns with ease. And it has the helpful addition of real-time analytics data.
Tableau also offers the most advanced machine-learning environment. So the data and reporting will become ever more sophisticated and valuable.
Sisense
Another leading tool to add to your shortlist is Sisense. It is a BI tool that can handle huge and complex data sets. Users can pull information from various sources and view them in one dashboard.
It offers user-friendly features like a drag-and-drop interface. And the dashboard provides lots of visual and interactive elements like graphs. Like Tableau, Sisense also comes with the advantage of real-time data.
So it will ensure your decision-making is accurate. With this tool, you can create an eCommerce strategy that anticipates market trends and gets ahead of the competition.
Looker
Looker is a cloud-based BI platform. That means you can use it from anywhere worldwide, making it ideal for modern remote-worker businesses.
Looker has a modeling language that helps you sift through vast datasets and turn them into business intelligence. The dashboard is in-depth and fully customizable.
Technically, it can feel speedy because it interacts directly with the database. So you won’t need to download data before you can analyze it. That also means you’ll have the most current data available at any point in time.
Looker is an excellent choice for managing inventory and studying customer behavior.
Oracle BI Publisher
The Oracle brand needs no introduction. For eCommerce, it’s the BI publisher that will be of most interest. It’s a robust choice suited to large enterprises and scalable.
You can create, manage and share reports with your team in the software. Plus, you can get data from several sources.
So you can use the tool to support many of your most important eCommerce strategies, such as inventory management and revenue growth. The reports are professional and well-formatted.
It’s ideal for companies that must share their reports with third parties or senior stakeholders.
Microsoft Power BI
Another tech giant on our list is Microsoft. Their Power BI tool offers attractive reporting capabilities. Like the other tools on this list, it provides lots of visualization, making it easier to dissect your data.
It’s intuitive and easy enough for a novice to use. Here, you can track sales performance for your eCommerce business. You can also analyze customer behavior and use your eCommerce data to follow market trends.
Part 3: Finding the Ideal Tool for You
Choosing the right BI tool for your eCommerce business means looking at your existing setup. You must understand your business needs to help find the perfect fit.
Start with your high-level objectives. What are your strategic goals? This will help you find the tool with the features most aligned with your needs.
Check for compatibility. Many of these tools will take data from various sources. However, check the detail to see whether there is a standard integration or if it needs some setup effort.
If it’s the latter, think about the technical capabilities you have in your team. Do you have someone who can set up the data sources in your new BI tool? Or do you need to outsource?
Budget will be a factor too. Many of the available tools will have different price points for varying packages. That will help you find something that’s within your budget.
Think about scalability, too. You want to future-proof your tools if you have a fast-growing eCommerce business. Your BI software today must work well for you in two years.
Finally, don’t forget that many tools offer a free trial or demo. Use these to your advantage to help you find a good match.
eCommerce Business Intelligence: Is Your Business Ready
Modern businesses find themselves in a unique position. Never before have they had the opportunity to tap into millions of data points and use that to their advantage.
But with that opportunity comes a challenge. To use this as business intelligence, you’ll need the right tools. Use our guide on the strategies and top tools for eCommerce business intelligence to get that head start.
Are you ready to find the perfect solution for your business? Begin here, and contact our team for a free IT consultation.
