Data connects all aspects of your business. The information and statistics generated from processes like sales, inventory management, and marketing can help drive decision making both online and in stores..
Ecommerce business intelligence (BI) includes the data you collect, store, and analyze to better understand your organization. It is commonly used to improve site performance, marketing strategy, and customer experience.
Ultimately, ecommerce business intelligence provides the insights you need to gain a competitive advantage and increase revenue for your furniture business.
The amount of data available for ecommerce businesses is unprecedented, and it continues to grow exponentially. On the plus side, you potentially have a treasure trove of accessible data. The real challenge is how to utilize your data for informed decision-making.
Another consideration is that furniture shoppers expect an omnichannel experience that lets them move seamlessly between your ecommerce store and brick-and-mortar locations. You should analyze BI for ecommerce as well as for physical stores to evaluate performance and the relationship between each channel.
Data-driven decisions should be based on historical and current data. Comparing what has happened in the past to what is happening now can be used to predict how changes to your current operations could influence your future performance. Here are two examples:
Ecommerce business intelligence can be used to determine which channels generate the most traffic. If you see a trend of one channel driving high converting traffic to your ecommerce website, you can increase ad spend for that channel. Additionally, you can analyze how your promotions performed over the past year to drive decisions about future promotions.
To deliver personalized experiences, which is a must-have for furniture ecommerce, you need to identify shopper and buyer segments. For each segment, you can determine the most frequently visited pages, where shoppers bounce off your website, and conversion metrics. That information can be used to improve both your website and marketing strategy.
Robust furniture ecommerce data enables you to interpret historical behavior, decipher patterns, and identify trends. Armed with this information, you can make inventory purchasing, staffing, marketing, and other decisions with confidence. For example, understanding who is shopping and what they are buying lets you predict inventory needs, while insight into preferred delivery days and times can help you improve scheduling.
Using these four types of data analytics, let’s look at an example you could use ecommerce business intelligence to identify opportunities:
Descriptive. This type of analysis uses data to explain what has happened. You could use descriptive analytics to determine a shopper’s navigation from the time they enter your website until they make a purchase or exit the site.
Diagnostic. If shoppers add items to the cart but exit without buying, you can dig into why people may be abandoning their carts. For example, what device are they using? What promotions were running? Did they not get approved for a certain payment type such as financing?
Prescriptive. This type of analysis determines what you should do next. For example, if you use BI and see that a majority of shoppers are on mobile devices, you should optimize the browser, search, and checkout process using mobile responsive design.
Predictive. What will be the result of user experience optimization? You can hypothesize and predict how different optimization tactics may drive sales and traffic - both online and in stores.
Keep in mind that analyzing BI for ecommerce should be part of a continuous improvement process. Growing your business, gaining a competitive edge, and increasing your revenue rely on refining your furniture ecommerce store improvement as new technologies and best practices become available.
It’s critical that the furniture ecommerce platform you select allows you keep your existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. A seamless integration allows your ecommerce platform to leverage the data already in your ERP and then inject online orders back into it.
The best ecommerce solutions also will streamline data analysis and business decision-making with furniture-focused reports and analytic dashboards pre-configured for the complex needs of the retail furniture industry.
There are many considerations when choosing ecommerce software; ecommerce business intelligence is just one.
To choose the right furniture ecommerce software for your business, you need to understand what it does, how it can help you reach your goals, and the considerations you should make before finalizing your decision.
Read A Buyer’s Guide to Choosing the Right Furniture Ecommerce Software and discover ten features you need to enable business intelligence-driven decisions for a successful ecommerce business.