E-Retail Online Commerce Analytics| Tableau Data Visualization

You don’t suffer from a lack of data. But you no doubt face an avalanche of questions about how that data can be used to drive your site.
According to the PwC report Future of India - The Winning Leap, emergence of new technologies, especially mobile, in India has sparked a social change that’s difficult to quantify. While mobile, internet, and social media penetration and growth can be quantified, describing the changes in social values and lifestyles that have accompanied those trends is far more challenging.
E-commerce Industry growth potential in India
Currently, eTravel comprises 70% of the total eCommerce market. ETailing, which comprises of online retail and online marketplaces, has become the fastest-growing segment in the larger market having grown at a CAGR of around 56% over 2009-2014. The size of the eTail market is pegged at 6 billion USD in 2015. Books, apparel and accessories and electronics are the largest selling products through eTailing, constituting around 80% of product distribution. The increasing use of smartphones, tablets and internet broadband and 3G has led to developing a strong consumer base likely to increase further.
By 2020, eTail in India is expected to account for 3% of total retail. Further, orders per million are expected to more than double from five million in 2013 to 12 million by 2016, which will mean more opportunities for both consumers and eTail companies.
Analytics an integral part of e-commerce
The rise of Internet, smartphone and social media users have made analytics an integral part of any digital business. There is abundance of customer data in every business including e-commerce and analytics helps in deriving meaningful insights to help the business in growing and serving the customers better. Massive increases in the volume of data and the complexity of information from CRM, ERP, point of sales (POS) data and other systems make it difficult to have customer behavior insights without a focused analytical interface. The e-commerce industry generates data from several sources like e-tailer website, IT systems, review and ratings providers and social media sites. E-tailer need to have real-time access to information to measure return on online investments and optimize the channel mix.
There are basic analytics capabilities available with the e-commerce players like basket size analysis, average order value and conversion ratio, but with the changing scenario and increasing customer base the organizations need to deploy deeper analytics solutions that provide actionable insight around overall digital customer experience. The analytics solution should include end to end process starting from the vendor management and supply chain to customer satisfaction. It should have holistic view of the data spanning across all departments such marketing, sales, customer service, finance and the supply chain for gaining better insights and making strategic business decisions.
How interactive visualization works
One important element that’s been missing from BI and analytics platforms is a way to bridge human language in the user interface to machine language more effectively. User interfaces have included features such as drag and drop for decades, but drag and drop historically has been linked to only a single application function—moving a file from one folder to another, for example.
What a tool such as Tableau does differently is to make manipulating the data through familiar techniques (like drag and drop) part of an ongoing dialogue with the database extracts that are in active memory. By doing so, the visual user interface offers a more seamless way to query the data layer.
Across the world companies are leveraging tableau to view real-time customer’s shopping basket and to optimize campaigns in real-time. The interactive visualizations are used to create detailed reports on consumer buying habits across the major outlets.
Retailers use data to:
• See and understand multi-channel information in a single location
• Monitor operations and track inventory in real-time mobile dashboards
• Zoom in on consumer segments to understand their behavior
• Spot top-performing locations and opportunities on a map
• Transform product and ad placement from an art into a science
Analytics is the future of the online business but it needs a focused study of the organizational objectives and goals for effective implementation and cost savings.
Tableau makes it easy for you to create and share dashboards quickly and effectively. In a matter of minutes you can connect to nearly any data source, use an intuitive interface to analyze your data visually, and then drag-and-drop to create dashboards. No programming expertise is required.