E-commerce keeps on growing worldwide. In a few years, researchers believe that retail e-commerce will be worth over $3.5 trillion. If you’re into e-commerce, you can anticipate much bigger competition due to global growth. As such, you must utilize all possible resources of competitive advantage, including analytics and data.

Analytics has shown to be the difference maker in e-commerce. It can trace all your customers’ movements to see where your traffic comes from, what merchandise they are looking at, the length of time they spend on a specific page, what items are in their carts, and how profitable are you in closing sales. This lets you know the behavior of your customers. Analytics professionals believe that knowing buyer behavior is the answer to bigger conversions.

By understanding these, you would know which areas you need to work on in your services and products. Nonetheless, this is predicated on allowing analytics early on. Here are 7 ways analytics can help enhance your e-commerce efforts:

1 – Tailor a customer experience unique to your market

Giving an outstanding customer experience is crucial to e-commerce. You should curtail customer effort from the second they come to your page until you get the sale. While there has been a lot of research done to identify top practices to think about when creating the user experience, it is still critical to observe how customers act in your own context, particularly if you function in a specific niche market. For instance, if you provide a good number of big-ticket items, consumers may want to explore more of the product in comparison to inexpensive items. Analytics can let you know what content consumers are searching for. This way you can reinforce features, like complete product descriptions and reviews.

2 – Curb cart abandonment

Cart abandonment is a big concern for e-commerce. E-commerce among all industries undergoes an average abandonment of about 65%. The reasons are diverse from unpredicted costs to complex checkout procedures to not a lot of payment methods. Via analytics, it’s possible to identify the precise instances when consumers leave your service. This way, you can enhance these areas and even perform interventions in order to get them back.

3 – Improve marketing efforts

You can create engagement campaigns and loyalty programs grounded in the behavior of customers to promote your business. Analytics can be combined with automation tools to help oversee marketing campaigns. For instance, when talking about cart abandonment, automation tools can prompt email reminders or promo codes pop-ups just as customers leave in order to tempt them to go through with the sale.

4 – Manage stocks and pricing better

It’s easy to decide what products are doing fine based on sales figures. Nonetheless, this doesn’t give the whole picture. Analytics can aid you to get deeper into your sales data. You can search if there are products that are commonly browsed or put into carts but don’t get purchased. You can then determine what actions need to be taken, like adjusting your prices. You can even narrow down your catalog and concentrate on the ones that produce the best profit for you. You can also think about moving upmarket if you see that you are selling high-priced products more than low-priced products.

5 – Minimize returns

If you ever looking for clothes online, you know how complex it is to get the right size even if there are size charts. Even Amazon consumers have to depend on the feedback from other consumers to make sense of an item’s true size. Fashion retailers in the US state a return rate of somewhere between 15 to 40 percent. Faulty sizing is widely responsible for such a huge rate. Retailers have to shoulder much of the expenses from returns. With the huge rate, returns are costing many companies. To help stop this, platforms such as True Fit utilize analytics to offer fit ratings and size recommendations for consumers. This reduces shopper anxiety and averts item returns.

6 – Enable personalized recommendations

Personalization is the answer to customer engagement. The main ingredient to Amazon’s success is its personal recommendations element. Recommendations are responsible for around 30% of its sales. Fueling the recommendation engine are algorithms that depend on the analysis of vast historical customer data. You can really consider having your own recommendations engine and this demand tracking customer behavior on the onset.

7 – Prepare for cross-border e-commerce

Growths in logistics and payments services have allowed many e-commerce businesses to spread worldwide. However, localization is a real test for cross-border e-commerce. Culture has a big impact on the preferences of consumers. Some areas of the world favor particular products despite not doing well in your other areas. By utilizing analytics, you can compare the behaviors of consumers specific to each market, allowing you to tailor your strategies and campaigns appropriately

The vital thing to know about analytics is that it provides you factual information about your business. In a high-risk environment like e-commerce, it is critical to depend on real numbers instead of intuition. Using analytics from the beginning will assist you in being mindful of all inclinations that are influencing your business. Using these understandings, you can then make the necessary changes.  You can also gather much more information about your customers and your business. These can be useful for your business in the future particularly when executing new programs and features.

If you’d like to discuss how you can further your e-commerce business, contact RedWave Technology Group, LLC at (205) 917-5757.