Big data has began transforming how businesses across the continent operate, with the most significant notice being across finance and the e-commerce industry. Retail business on the other hand is on an upward growth spiral in the country with small to mid-size retail shops immensely growing in numbers.
Unfortunately today’s customers are not limited to the alternative of shopping within a specific location, the internet has given them enormous power to shop virtually from anywhere and retail business has to evolve with it to have a competitive edge over others.
For a retail business, for you to grow and prosper you need to offer advanced and fancy shopping experience to your customer along with the product and service you offer. We are currently noticing an increase in the number of online shopping portals across the region which poses a huge threat to the retail industry since customers will have hundred of options and brands to choose from. If you’re not offering something unique to them, they will simply switch to the latter.
Small to midsize businesses suffer a lot of challenges when competing with their e-commerce counterparts, from failing to predict what their customers expect from their shops to having limited budgets to market and promote their goods. Being a retail shop, you need to understand the perception of your shoppers to fully serve and offer them high quality experience, all these and many more can be solved by closely watching the adoption of technology and big data.
Big data Explained!
Big data is usually a group of large data sets retailers can use to analyze and understand past shopping patterns, reveal trends and help evaluate extremely large information collected from different sources to better decisions and strategize business moves.
The upside with big data solutions is; they are not limited to online tools only, supermarkets and offline businesses can as well adopt tools that can help monitor and analyze their customers information from their register receipts.
Below are some of the values retailers will enjoy when they adopt the various tools available.
- Easy optimization of prices where decisions will be based on real time data and prices correctly adjusted according to what competitors are doing.
- Better understand the market conditions: Questions to do with future demand of a specific product and its popularity can best be answered by the big data tools to aid businesses organize resources to gain optimum results.
- Better Product Recommendations with data on past purchase and online behavior.
- Control online reputation by keeping track on what people are saying about your business.
Since most companies are robustly switching from analog to online ecosystems, both individuals and companies are generating a huge amount of data that with the right skills set and tools it can be used to determine the right tactics to drive actions in the right way.
