Retail industry is ever evolving at fast pace since barcodes are introduced. The trail of big data is disrupting retail operations: when the product is manufactured, shipped, stocked, advertised, purchased, consumed and talked about.
Manage inventory – The big data way
Data driven inventory management can quickly track when the levels are out of sync with demand. Not only that, big data analytics can help identify adjacent product line and make recommendations to retail buyers.
Identify trends
Analytics provides unprecedented ability to identify trends so, retail buyers can maximise from those insights. Today significant world population is active on social media. Analytics tools that can peep into tweets, facebook posts and blogs to identify what people have to say about specific product. Thus, providing opportunity for improvising the product and identifying customer profiles that leads to further opportunities.
Targeted advertisements
Being able to capture large scale customer profile was never possible earlier. Thus, exposing specific customer segment to most targeted advertisements based on their interest is possible because of big data analytics.
Boost omnichannel selling
Retailers are able to leverage “omnichannel selling”. For example, offering special coupons to in-store customers who viewed the same items while visiting the online store. By capturing customer activities for online store visits and sending targeted offers to only those customers was never possible. Big data has opened up endless possibilities like optimizing price based on geography.
Start analyzing at low cost
According to Mike Gualtieri, analyst at Forrester Research Inc., In the past data experiments were prohibitively expensiveToday we have open source technologies like hadoop that plays a key role. Experimenting with big data at small scale using open source technologies and scale out once you are able to catch meaningful insights should be the sure fire strategy.Big data analytics is the holi grail of retail industry.
