With almost 4.79 billion people accessing the internet, the world seems to be completely transformed than it was a few decades ago. This digital transformation has changed the way we access entertainment, order food, or buy goods, and also the way we look at business data.
Digitization has presented e-commerce companies with a great opportunity to build and thrive. You will be surprised to know that, on average, $10.66 was made for every dollar that an e-commerce organization spends on business intelligence. The information gained from business intelligence tools can thus help your company in cost reduction and implement more efficient business processes.
Integrating Business Intelligence in E-Commerce
Shortened as BI, Business Intelligence is the practice of utilizing tools for sorting and accessing data and presenting them in the form of actionable insights so that businesses can frame their tactical and strategic goals.
It is mainly leveraged for a better understanding of a huge amount of data from various tools, including chatbots, sales automation, inventory management, logistics, or any other number-generating functionalities in an e-commerce website. Various ecommerce application development services companies are now helping businesses know more about business intelligence and how implementing the same can help them grow.
Perks of Business Intelligence in E-Commerce
Every business has unique needs and each leverage business intelligence for specific business purpose. However, here is a list of common benefits that business intelligence offers for e-commerce organizations.
Improves Decision-Making
Your chances of success rise significantly when your decisions are backed by data. You can start making data-driven decisions with BI as your leading tool. Historical marketing information, analysis of prices and schemes, and information about revenue and sales are some of the top features that a BI tool would offer you. You can also quickly analyze reports, evaluate your actions and prepare for positive changes in the near future.
Improves Productivity
With the power of business intelligence and data analytics, you can improve your company’s productivity overall. For instance, with the BI tool, you can monitor the day-to-day activities of your employees in real time and make the best decision when it comes to improving the company’s sales performance. Also, you can identify areas of improvement in your business based on the historical performance of data.
Better Sales
With companies earning a huge return on investment, business intelligence tools have helped reduce costs and ensured higher sales. BI provides access to the sales trends based on the customers purchasing behavior, preferences, online shopping experiences, reactions to promotions, and other patterns that directly influence sales.
All this information can help the e-commerce organization frame strategic goals and achieve them to maximize its revenue.
Streamline Business Operations
Business intelligence software helps e-commerce organizations streamline their operations and become proactive by leveraging real-time data. This overall improves the company’s efficiency, productivity, and supply chain.
For instance, if a problem occurs in your e-commerce online stores, you can address the issue instantly without waiting for the next day’s report. Constant monitoring, thus, helps e-commerce organizations to manage their business and frame better marketing strategies smoothly.
Boost Customer Experience
Business intelligence tools also contribute to bringing in positive user experience. This allows organizations to stay ahead of their competitors, as they are now directly connected with customers through e-commerce websites and various social media channels.
As an e-commerce organization, you can push in relevant and engaging content that caters to the customer’s needs in real time. With BI software, you can make business decisions that are based on the latest information, which means you will be able to offer better services to your customers.
How to Choose the Right Business Intelligence Tool for your E-Commerce Business?
Finding the best BI tool for your e-commerce business can be difficult, as dozens of tools are available in the marketplace with varied prices and features. Here are some basic features you need to check for while choosing a business intelligence tool.
Dashboards
Ensure that the opted BI tool has the right dashboard that allows the users to directly view the metrics and drill down to a better granular view.
Ad-Hoc Analysis
An ad-hoc analysis feature is a process specifically designed to ensure direct or single business questions. For instance, how much revenue did we make last month, or how many sales did the new ad campaign bring in?
Real-Time Analysis
In addition to the previous data analysis, the BI tool you choose must provide you with real-time reports with access to the current data. This helps businesses to make faster decisions in a short period of time.
Visualization
With the help of the visualization feature, an overwhelming amount of data can be converted to a more digestive format, thus allowing the users to interpret the raw data and understand the changing trends. For instance, the graphical representation of sales trends would allow the executives to easily interpret and understand how sales have decreased or increased over the passage of time.
Summing It Up
Business intelligence is not just crucial for large e-commerce companies; mid-size and growing e-commerce businesses can also utilize the same for understanding their marketing and sales-related data.
Business intelligence software is vital for e-commerce businesses because it enables you to acquire better knowledge and make decisions based on figures and facts rather than assumptions. If you are looking forward to staying ahead in the competition in the upcoming years, then you should definitely implement BI today.
