Chase Zieman, chief data science officer, Cart.com
Every business aspires to be data-driven, and to use smart, responsive analytics to unlock new efficiencies and drive creative strategies for success. Data is essential in ecommerce, providing insights into all areas of the shopper’s journey—from demand generation using advanced marketing tools, to offering products across multiple storefronts or marketplaces, to fulfillment and post-sale services.
At least, that’s the theory. The reality is that ecommerce businesses often struggle to join the dots between the data they generate and the decisions they make. Founders often fail to see relationships between insights from disparate corners of their business—social media ads, on-time delivery rates, or product-return requests—and miss out on additive lessons that arise when they address those data streams through a single unified platform.
As DTC decision-makers look to the future, it’s clear they need better ways to run their businesses and turn raw data into actionable insights. What’s needed is a seamless, integrated approach to data harvesting and analytics: a truly unified platform to serve as connective tissue across merchants’ operations and enable intelligent decision-making across the ecommerce value chain.
Level up your data strategy
Of course, ecommerce companies already use data to make decisions. If you’re running an ecommerce business, you probably pay close attention to ad performance and rely heavily on metrics such as return on ad spend (ROAS) to shape your strategy.
Certainly, metrics such as ROAS will always be valuable. But relying on ad metrics to shape ecommerce strategy is a bit like looking for lost car keys under a streetlamp, simply because that’s the only place that isn’t dark. What’s needed is a new approach that illuminates more of the surrounding terrain and gives businesses better insights into the opportunities and challenges they face.
Consider, for instance, how warehousing, fulfillment and shipping costs interfere with your broader operations. If you’re only using marketing data to drive strategic planning, you’re missing a massive piece of the puzzle. Your organization needs a new approach that weaves together data insights from all aspects of your business.
You might use marketing insights to drive inventory planning and vice versa to make smarter decisions across your business. Or you might find that customer service interactions are a rich source of insights. A spike in calls in a particular region might point to remedy a shipping logjam—if you use data about customer concerns to identify the issue.
Product returns, too, can be incredibly valuable. With the right analytics, you can diagnose problems that lead to unsatisfied customers—from glitches in product descriptions to photos that don’t show the correct product color to unusual buying patterns that might suggest the retailer misconfigured the promotion.
Breaking down the silos
When you capture, unify, and apply insights across your operations, it’s possible to level up your operations, keep customers happier, and achieve amazing bottom-line benefits. The problem is that there’s currently very little integration across most ecommerce functions. Marketers and logistics teams don’t have much to do with each other, and it’s usually business leaders—who already have enough on their plate—who serve as connective tissue between different divisions.
That’s why it’s important to embrace a new paradigm—one we call ecommerce-as-a-service (EcaaS)—which brings all ecommerce functions under a single umbrella. Instead of fighting with multiple contractors and consultants, EcaaS gives ecommerce founders a single streamlined, cloud-connected suite from which to manage all their operational needs without distractions or hassle.
When you embrace EcaaS, you also get a smarter and more streamlined approach to leveraging data across your business operations. By its nature, EcaaS depends on bringing business operations into a single hub, giving you a one-stop solution with access to all available data about your business, with no friction and no scope for critical information slipping through cracks.
From data to analytics
It’s not just that you have a single source of visibility in your operations, either. Done right, EcaaS leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to integrate powerful data-driven insights into your workflows. It gives managers instant access to the actionable intelligence they need to adjust procurement spending, modify promotional campaigns, or optimize revenue and profitability opportunities.
That’s critical because capturing, staging, and reporting data is only the first step—you also need to extract insights from it. A well-designed EcaaS solution can automate much of that process, using AI tools to precisely surface the data intelligence you need to make smarter decisions in exactly the moment in which you need it.
By delivering unified analytics and data science across storefronts (site, customers, sales, and products), warehouse operations, and digital campaigns including but not limited to Facebook properties, Google, and Amazon advertising, an EcaaS platform helps brands to identify root causes of trends and anomalies in conversion rate, performance marketing campaigns, or customer satisfaction. It can deliver AI-generated product recommendations to customers and provide new ways for brand managers to minimize cart abandonment and product returns. And it can offer faster and more powerful insights into sales, inventory, and all other aspects of your business.
Make data part of your DNA
By integrating business functions, the EcaaS approach breaks down silos and brings data within reach. Couple that with powerful data science solutions, including AI and world-class interactive reporting tools, and you can unlock incredible new insights that have previously been inaccessible for most ecommerce brands. That adds up to more efficient operations, new insights that unlock important strategic opportunities, and—perhaps most importantly—better experiences for customers.
A unified analytics platform, in other words, is the true Holy Grail for ecommerce businesses: a way to defragment operations, break data free from silos, and bring actionable intelligence, data-driven insights, and automation into all aspects of ecommerce planning and execution.
If data is the new oil, then unified analytics is the combustion engine—the critical infrastructure that lets you unlock its potential. Ecommerce should be data driven, and now it’s finally possible to unlock the full power of your business’s data and harness it to drive your brand forward.
Cart.com offers ecommerce platform backend/storefront software and complementary services such as logistics and marketing.