It is an unspoken fact that business intelligence is the silver bullet to the success of any eCommerce business. After the Covid-19 outbreak, we have witnessed a massive disruption in the online retail industry. Online shopping became the new normal for even those people who always preferred buying from their local brick-and-mortar stores. This severed up the competition in eCommerce and has driven the online retailers towards digital transformation that includes executing the best business intelligence software to gain insights relevant to customers’ expectations & market uncertainties, and based on that execute effective promotional & sales strategies helping them to lead the industry and set new benchmarks.
This blog discusses some of the basics of business intelligence highlighting the 4 powerful ways of using business intelligence software in eCommerce business.
What is Business Intelligence (BI)?
Business Intelligence (BI) otherwise referred to as competitive intelligence is a methodology applied to collect and scrutinize information and present it in the form of comprehensive reports that help make informed strategic decisions. For example, if an eCommerce business wishes to discontinue one or few of their products that are not in demand, BI sales reports help in doing that quickly and accurately. With the unambiguous information at your fingertips, you can ascertain the right steps for your business that can enable it to gain high standards and serve customers exceptionally well.
BI can be leveraged to better comprehend a huge amount of data collected from various tools like marketing automation software, CRM, chatbots, inventory management system, etc.
Before the BI tools were even introduced, businesses used to rely on spreadsheets and manual methods of collecting data from different sources. Then, a data cleaning and mining process was carried out to develop reports that can help make decisions. However, this process was quite time-consuming and required tedious human efforts that were prone to errors. Fortunately, technology took over all manual processes, and business intelligence software is playing a bigger role today. It is at the top of several businesses’ investment priorities.
What is Business Intelligence Software?
Business intelligence software is an application that can extract data from different sources to generate reports that are easy to comprehend, enabling quick decision-making. Business Intelligence software in eCommerce is applied to gather, analyze, and streamline the data relating to the online shoppers, marketing & sales processes, suppliers, inventory management, etc. and design compelling reports, keeping manual efforts to a minimum. Data that is scattered over different tools within the organization is of no use. You cannot come to conclusions using disorganized data. Business Intelligence in eCommerce represents the data in the form of intuitive dashboards that make it simple for you to understand the current market situation and customer behavior and accordingly make smart decisions that can benefit your business.
Significance of BI Software for eCommerce Businesses
“Just as the eyes are the windows to the soul, Business Intelligence is a window to the dynamics of a business”
Cindi Howson – Author & BI Consultant
Business intelligence software for eCommerce business, also known as eCommerce BI plays a major role in understanding customers, satisfying them, and driving more revenue. It adds your business value. But how? Let’s elaborate this further –
Making Accurate Decisions
Business intelligence software enables eCommerce businesses to make decisions based on real statistical facts and not on assumptions. For example, you can clearly see how many customers have abandoned their cart in the past month, analyze the reasons for abandonment based on the real figures, and make improvements accordingly.
Identifying Issues
eCommerce business intelligence software provides an in-depth and detailed view of the data in an intuitive manner that is easy to understand. This helps in identifying the issues before they arise and impact the bottom line. For example, you can ascertain the decline in the demand for a product before stocking up the inventory and thus save the business from unnecessary investment.
Gaining Competitive Benefits
The business intelligence software for eCommerce helps in analyzing which marketing strategies work and which don’t. Based on this analysis, the businesses can uncover the opportunities and make optimum use of them to gain competitive benefits and lucrative results.
Improving Operations
Business intelligence software can analyze the sales data and help you investigate the internal operational issues in the organization. Lack of efficiency, negligent customer support, and lost productivity are some of the aspects that can be identified from the reports generated by the BI software. These reports can make it easier for you to fix issues on time and prevent your business from incurring heavy losses.
All the above benefits of eCommerce BI ultimately lead to delighting customers, improving brand reputation, and gaining more conversions. The question still remains is how to leverage business intelligence software in eCommerce? Here are 4 powerful reports that BI software can generate, helping better understand your customers and execute successful operational and marketing strategies.
4 Powerful BI Reports That Drive Success in eCommerce
#1 Digital Marketing Reports
Digital marketing strategies like SEO and PPC that help in generating leads create a lot of data that can be optimally used to nurture prospects and gain conversions consistently. The business intelligence software allows you to extract the data from marketing automation tools that can be analyzed and represented in dashboards that help design successful marketing strategies that guarantee lucrative results.
#2 Sales Reports
The sales figures tell everything about your business. eCommerce BI software can help you get answers to the questions like how many products were sold, which were the best selling products, which months of the year did you sell the maximum and many more. The answers to these questions can guide your sales team accordingly and implement methods resulting in increased sales.
#3 Inventory Management Report
The inventory management reports generated by BI software represent the data about the stock level but also helps you in analyzing the location of items, their shelf life, and the value they hold. These reports can be used for making sales and ordering decisions accurately.
#4 Profit Margin Report
The business intelligence software helps you analyze the data relating to your store’s profits from the different products for sale. It also indicates the suppliers’ costs, operational costs, and overheads, enabling you to minimize the expenses and create business plans that can accelerate your profit margins.
Business Intelligence is the Key to Grow eCommerce Revenue….
The business intelligence market is indicated to grow and touch USD 33.3 billion by 2025. The demand is huge with increasing data. The reasons behind this huge demand are many. eCommerce BI involves gathering and processing a huge amount of complex data and converting it into easily understandable data for the purpose of making strategic business decisions. It allows eCommerce businesses to analyze and identify the problems and come up with the informed solutions that can drive future growth.
eCommerce BI software solutions are suitable for all size and type of businesses. Even small and medium-sized eCommerce stores are using Business Intelligence software to understand the behavior of their customers throughout their journey and make better decisions to stay ahead of the competitors and drive future exponential growth. So, are you ready to derive the advantages of eCommerce Business Intelligence (BI) Tools ? If yes, invest in the top BI software to gain profound insights, and increased efficiency in the business operations. .
