Business Intelligence (BI) is a process that uses a variety of tools to help companies collect, analyze, present, and integrate data to produce actionable insights. With as many as 46% of companies using BI tools as a key part of their business strategy, learn about the importance of BI for your company’s growth.
Would you go to an unknown place without directions?
Have you ever considered going to some new place without navigation or any directions? That sounds very adventurous but not very wise. So, will you try to lead your business without a clear set path?
Business Intelligence is like navigation
To efficiently navigate your online business, you need timely and accurate information, which is a base for the decision-making process. Doesn’t matter if it’s a stationery store or eCommerce company – comprehensive information decides if you’ll win or lose with the competition.
Defining Business Intelligence
To properly define Business Intelligence, often referred to as BI, you can imagine it as the brain of operation added into the software. It’s a method using multiple tools to improve the process of collecting and analyzing present and integrated data to support actionable insights for business growth.
Why E-Commerce businesses are adopting Business Intelligence
With access to advanced and, above all, automated business analytics, retailers can make critical decisions much faster, which can affect the value of sales in the online store.
To back up this statement, Forbes conducted a study showing that last year, 54% of enterprises felt that cloud BI was essential to their current and future businesses. One-third of large organizations are expected to implement decision intelligence by 2023.
Advantages of BI in eCommerce
Decisions based on facts and statistics – Business Intelligence used in eCommerce allows you to make strategic decisions based on statistics. These decisions can determine a company’s direction, growth, and purpose.
Discovery of sales trends – Using BI, eCommerce companies can easily discover sales trends among their users by analyzing online customer behavior (reactions to promotions, buying patterns, online experiences), which will ultimately translate into increased revenue.
Issues control – Business Intelligence was made to analyze all kinds of data, even the bad ones. In eCommerce companies, this helps determine where the error or quality issue is and make improvements. These problems include lower sales productivity, customer churn caused by poor call center service, or misanalyzed market and competition. This data can then be processed by various modules to assess where errors and quality issues are occurring along with information on how to fix and prevent them in the future.
360-degree customer view – BI helps you understand your customer’s needs and behaviors and analyze that data to get a 360-degree view of their actions. This helps you retain valuable customers and seize missed sales opportunities.
Managing stock and inventory – Business Intelligence provides valuable data predicting overstock and out-of-stock situations through full inventory analysis using dedicated replenishment, sales, and forecasting data.
Analyzing data from multiple sources – thanks to Business Intelligence services it is possible to evaluate data from many sources (e.g. marketing automation systems, Google Analytics, informatic systems) and to present them in the form of comprehensive reports. This allows, among others, analyzing:
- effectiveness of marketing activities,
- buying trends,
- the popularity of specific products,
- changing product prices,
- sales volume.
How do BI tools increase sales in online stores?
With access to advanced and automated business analytics, it is possible to accelerate decision-making that directly impacts sales.
By knowing what products sell best, with BI, companies can build stock, maintain continuity of offerings, and ultimately fulfill more orders at the same time. Analysis of marketing efforts shows which ones will yield the highest ROI and which ones will not. Business intelligence tools can create actionable data reports, and through the use of AI technology, analyze that data, leading to beneficial decisions for online businesses.
Conclusions
Today’s world is overflowing with data, without which running a business would be impossible. Yet, the key factor is not to collect all the data in the world, but to understand and use it. With the help of Business Intelligence, any eCommerce company can grow quickly by entering a new market or identifying and converting potential customers.
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