Sunday 9 September 2012

E-commerce: Analytics' delight


Electronic commerce or e-commerce is an evolved-through-technology specimen of commerce, and is a widely welcomed and embraced way of doing commerce. And as competition is growing, a need to differentiate from competitors is growing too. In e-commerce data is a key strategic business asset. E-commerce website owners cannot see the buyers or visitors, so, their best actions (best CRM moves) have to be driven by the visitors’ foot-prints click-prints. Each click on website gives birth to data. Ability to manage this data as a strategic asset, and use it as a strategic differentiator is a key contributor to the success of an e-commerce operation. At the cost of stating the obvious, let’s compare a customer’s e-commerce shopping with commerce shopping.

E-commerce: Website visitor logs in to the e-commerce website
Commerce: Potential customer walks in to the retail store (representative commerce platform)

E-commerce: Or, Website visitor visits the site, but logs out within seconds, maybe just after seeing the home page
Commerce: Potential customer enters the retail store but comes out within minutes

E-commerce: Within the e-commerce website, he/she visits one of its page (or browse from one page to another)
Commerce: Potential customer visits section(s) of the retail store

E-commerce: Within a page, Website visitor moving to another page as a result of clicking on to the product-icon
Commerce: Potential customer seeing or checking some product(s) in the retail store

E-commerce: Website visitor, after spending some time on web-page explaining the product, doesn’t select it for e-cart
Commerce: Potential customer checks some product, say XYZ, but does not put it in the cart/basket

E-commerce: Website visitor selects the product and adds it into the e-cart
Commerce: Potential customer selects the product and put it into the cart/basket

E-commerce: Website visitor checks out of the e-cart, and continue for making the payment
Commerce: Potential customer selects his bundle of product(s) and move towards the payment counter

E-commerce: Website visitor selecting the payment option and begin filling his/her details for making the payment
Commerce: Potential customer communicates his/her mode of payment at the payment counter, and…..

E-commerce: Website visitor finally completes the details and makes the payment - converts into buyer.
Commerce: Potential customer makes payment – converts into buyer or customer

E-commerce: Or, Website visitor begin filling payment related details, but logs out without finishing the payment
Commerce: Potential customer finally, at the nth minute decide not to buy anything, leaving back the selected cart

In e-commerce, scope of conversion of action/behavior of a customer (Website visitor) into data is a lot more than in commerce. E-commerce’s edge lies in capturing “what happened in between?” and “what happened even when customer did not finally buy anything?” Or, to put it in some detail - in e-commerce, entire journey of a Website visitor from logging in to the website to his/her final purchase gets recorded in form of data – Yes, this aspect of covering the web pages customer visited, the products he/she checked before finalizing his/her cart covers “what happened in between?” part which is not usually captured when a customer is doing similar things physically inside the retail store (example of commerce). Similarly, in e-commerce, entire journey of a Website visitor from opening the website to his/her final decision of not to buy anything gets recorded. Or, we get data on a customer’s doing window-shopping e-window-shopping.

“With great power comes great responsibility” – a famous dialogue from a famous movie Spiderman. A lot of information getting captured in data puts high responsibility on analytics. In e-commerce analytics sits in the heart of decision-making.

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