The e-commerce industry is a large and wondrous space where thousands, if not millions, of brands are jostling with each other to capture the greatest share of consumer attention and wallets online.

With ability to provide global reach like never before, the Internet had proven to be a significant channel for retailers to sell and promote their products and services to all corners of the globe. However, merely copying one’s physical store and pasting a digital version of it on the web does not guarantee results.

Take for example, a Japanese multinational electronics and electrical equipment company with over 30,000 employees and operations in more than 40 countries.  Though it possessed over a century of history in traditional commerce, the company recognised the value the booming e-commerce market was presenting. It knew it had to seize the opportunity to enter this untapped market, not only to engage and interact with its customers but to also holistically assess the performance of its products.

Initially, the company’s website only offered customers an avenue to browse its catalogue, read product descriptions and purchase its products online. But they knew user experience was key and that their website was overdue for an overhaul.

The website was revamped to reflect the customer’s journey and engage directly with its customers. It also functioned as a platform that collected data from customer visits, which enabled the company to mine for insights into its customers’ demographics, browsing history, click behaviour and purchasing patterns in near to real-time as possible.

The company could also notify customers of new products, events and promotions relevant to their tastes. In addition, a loyalty system was implemented to enable the company to identify high spending customers and reward them accordingly.

From a conglomerate’s point of view, Fusionex’s e-commerce and big data solutions was what helped this monolithic retailer harness and utilise its data to derive useful insights into its customer’s behaviours so it could fine tune its marketing, sales, customer acquisition and retention, and loyalty program to maximise sales, as well as grow and keep its customer base.

Consolidating Customer Data

 Conglomerates oft times have many diverse businesses that can range, for example, from theme parks and medical centres to shopping malls and institutes of higher learning. Such huge corporations will need to maximise the value and optimise customer data they had gleaned. Each of its businesses may employ different platforms, adding to the challenge of getting a consolidated view of the conglomerate’s entire customer base.

To address such challenges, the company should implement a complete customer lifecycle management suite, all the way from a central reservation facility and enterprise-wide loyalty management platform to business intelligence and big data analytics.

This end-to-end solution can give the conglomerate a complete 360 degree view of its customer base, including spending habits and trends, and take action based on these insights such as launching promotional campaigns targeted at customers who would most likely act upon receiving such information.

Needless to say, this would lead to an increase in both customer engagement and revenue.

Big Data Analytics for Retail Operations and Management

Another tremendous challenge for a large retail chain with outlets spread across multiple locations is receiving information in a timely manner. Then there is the challenge of keeping tabs on all the numbers such as sales, revenue, stock numbers, replenishments, marketing campaigns and their effectiveness, staff performance, to name a few.

Based upon years of retail industry experience, Fusionex has come up with a Retail Industry data model for retailers to use to automate data extraction from the various sources. The suite comes with various reporting capabilities and dashboards, designed to provide easy visualisations for senior management to digest.

The platform’s self-services reporting tools are also especially useful for business users to create their own ad-hoc reports without depending on the IT department, leading to a large overall savings in cost and more efficient inventory management.

Something for the Little Guys

Malaysia’s economy is powered by over 250,000 small to medium-sized businesses, and a majority of them likely leverage on the Internet as a borderless marketplace for their goods and services. Their size would not make usage of big data analytics any less important.

In fact, it may be necessary for them to utilise the data they collect to better engage with their customers, especially customers residing halfway across the world that they would most likely never meet. With the whole world being their total addressable market, big data analytics becomes all the more important for SME retailers to learn about the purchasing habits of their global audience.

Fusionex FORYOU levels the playing field by making the big, enterprise-level functions and features of Big Data Analytics available and accessible to SMEs. It offers three easy plans, with a range of features suited to your business needs, including loyalty and rewards, email and social media outreach, Big Data and Analytics, mobile app development, and placement in multiple online marketplaces.