Data can be extremely important to ecommerce merchants, as it helps them understand their customers better and generate more revenue. There are many ways a merchant can use data in its business. Here are 101 of them.
101 Ways Ecommerce Merchants Can Use Data
- Analyze traffic in real-time to determine the pages and products that are the most popular.
- Track success of promotions and tweak them (if required) by monitoring in real-time the promotion codes used.
- Conduct A/B testing on conversions and usability and get instant results.
- Provide more visibility to the customers by implementing real-time inventory checks.
- Adjust prices on the fly, and beat competitors’ by dynamically checking their prices.
- Introduce a new feature, like product videos, and monitor activity to determine if it is a hit with the shoppers.
- Implement personalization on the site, to target shoppers for higher conversions.
- Enable event-driven offers by tracking customers and their activity.
- Support not just text search but also image search by implementing image-likeness in real-time.
- Monitor customer search activity on the site and offer assistance if they are having difficulty in finding the product.
- Implement natural language search — i.e., spoken words — to allow customers to find the products they are looking for.
- Use attributes across different products to auto filter search results.
- Experiment with product assortments based on analyzing regional and customer preferences.
- Recommend products based on a customer’s history, current browsing session, and top selling products.
- Notify customers if a product in their cart is about to go out-of-stock or an active promotion is about to expire or get launched.
- Show the shipping time and available quantity for a product in the shopping cart to improve conversions.
- Identify the best customers and create a better experience for them compared to others.
- Alert customers if item(s) in their wish lists are on sale.
- If a shopper logs in with a Facebook ID, use his likes on Facebook to drive product recommendations on the ecommerce site.
- Enable omnichannel integration by supporting the same pricing, promotions, and product inventory regardless of the channel.
- Personalize promotional emails for each customer, versus sending the same blanket email to everyone.
- Use pattern analysis tools to identify unhappy product reviewers.
- Expedite customer service by pre-aggregating customer information from multiple systems and maintaining it in-memory.
- Set up a process to make every customer service resolution available in the searchable knowledge base.
- Improve customer service by analyzing recorded voice calls and customer emails.
- Provide order status details to customers, to avoid unnecessary calls to customer service staff.
- Conduct sentiment analysis on social network feeds, to take quick action on issues.
- Monitor frequency of calls from shoppers, time to resolve an issue, and products with most issues — to improve service.
- Review orders in real-time to detect unusual ordering activity.
- Set up automated processes to identify fraud and learn new patterns of fraud.
- Automate PCI compliance to avoid credit card fraud issues.
- Ship orders faster by mapping ordered items into pick locations in the warehouse.
- Automate picking process as much as possible by using RFID tags for pallets or individual products.
- Set up thresholds to replenish inventory in the warehouse. These thresholds will vary based on product, season, and region.
- Automate product pricing based on desired margins and the cost to procure or manufacture — to be more efficient.
- Forecast the new products that will be successful by analyzing the current ordering trends.
- Use algorithms to analyze order ship-to addresses to reduce overall shipping costs.
- Show actual shipping costs to customers by conducting real-time calculations before the customer completes the purchase.
- Track shipments in real-time, including stoppages, to minimize losses.
- Display all tax and duty costs when shipping internationally.
- Integrate with the shipping provider to display actual delivery date.
- Clearly display order status to allow the customer to make order changes before items are shipped.
- Ensure each product has a field for calculating the cost for return processing. Oftentimes, sending the replacement without processing the return is less expensive.
- Analyze returns to improve product quality and the customer experience.
- Review return trends by customer and by product to identify fraud, product quality, and other issues.
- Implement checklists for each returned item prior to making it available for sale again.
- Utilize dashboards to get real-time insights into sales, product inventory, number of customers, and so on.
- Automatically track key performance indicators for each new feature, such as product videos.
- Monitor shoppers’ browsers to ensure universal compatibility with your ecommerce site.
- Automate checks for site accessibility, broken links, and redirects.
- Notify a registered user based on any suspicious login activity seen on the site, such as a login from different computers within a short period of time, and random clicks that do not align with the browsing history.
- Maintain and update your ecommerce site to keep each page size below a threshold, such as 100KB.
- Create real-time alerts for site performance issues.
- Notify customers as soon as possible for system outages.
- Monitor and define workarounds with a third-party for all customer communications, to avoid communication failures.
- Identify periods of low activity before taking down the site for maintenance; provide a workaround to place orders.
- If your site has international customers, support regional metrics and sizes.
- Build a customer community to share ideas and promote products.
- Determine shopper’s device (i.e., desktop or mobile) and target with relevant products.
- Reward loyalty, even without a loyalty program, by offering special personalized incentives to customers.
- Honor customer opt-outs and unsubscribes. Never spam customers.
- Analyze abandoned carts to determine the reasons.
- Use unique selling propositions while writing copy for the site. This applies to every page and also helps with search engine optimization.
- Utilize historic data and predictive modeling techniques to estimate year-over-year growth.
- Analyze a supplier’s performance by reviewing its activity, such as product delivery and packaging.
- Model how to scale your business and which areas are inefficient.
- To generate traffic, write guest posts on popular sites like LinkedIn and monitor traffic from each post.
- Collaborate with other small businesses and measure which ones are helping the business to grow.
- Track and tweak site usability with every new operating system, browser, and device release.
- Research the local market and its competitors before investing in localizing the site for a specific region.
- Identify popular regional payment methods and localize the site to support them for customers from that region.
- Run periodic customer surveys to continuously improve the site.
- Review referrer sites to identify where customers are coming from. This often identifies top competitors.
- Send notifications to customers to inform them of new product introductions based on their interests and preferences.
- Run real-time analysis to manage return on investment for each product and each customer. This can also be automated.
- If products have variable pricing, share pricing history and trends with customers, to help them determine the best time to buy.
- Run real-time credit checks to approve financing for customers for purchase of big-ticket items.
- Build a relationship with your customers by engaging them with your business via blogs, social network posts, raffles, and promotions.
- Analyze customer order history to send reminders. A customer who orders something on a certain day and ships it to a different address is probably purchasing a gift; an annual reminder might help.
- Automate dispute resolution by analyzing customer history and the reasons for a charge back.
- Provide extended return and exchange windows for loyal customers with valid reasons.
- Continuously monitor features and sections of the site that are not being used and remove them to optimize the site.
- Extend a product’s manufacturing capability by allowing customers to request customized products.
- Get inputs from customers and suppliers to improve the site, such as updates to a product description.
- Segment products to offer different items to different regions and to different groups of customers.
- Allow customers to search their order history, and reorder.
- Suggest replacements or substitutes for products that have been discontinued.
- Give incentives to customers to share their stories about a product’s performance months or years after purchase.
- Suggest gifts for customers by correlating data from multiple sources like social networks, wish lists, gift registries, purchase history, and gift recipient.
- Integrate data across all channels — web, mobile, brick-and-mortar — for a complete view of the business and its customers.
- Deploy sensors in big-ticket items to enable predictive maintenance by monitoring the device in real-time.
- Use sensors to improve products by tracking how customers use them. This requires an opt-in.
- Void warranties on big ticket and specialized items as necessary by monitoring sensor data in real time.
- Reward employees by real-time tracking of performance or customer service goals.
- Enable personalized, guided selling to make the purchase process faster.
- Automate supplier payments and receivables to minimize manual work and improve efficiency.
- Break down annual goals into smaller daily or weekly goals to create a sense of achievement.
- Anticipate peak load and the need for scaling by studying site patterns.
- Build operating models that are continuously updated for different regions to comply with local laws and customs.
- Work with customers on charitable causes, like reducing waste, going green, and helping youth.
- Continuously optimize business operations to deploy new ways to use data, to grow.