How can you use data visualization to improve your team's understanding of merchandise trends?

1 Define your goals

Before you start creating any data visualization, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. What are the main questions you want to answer? What are the key metrics you want to track? What are the best practices or benchmarks you want to compare? Your goals will guide your data selection, analysis, and presentation. For example, if you want to understand how your merchandise performance varies by season, location, or customer segment, you need to have data that reflects those dimensions.

2 Choose your data sources

Once you have defined your goals, you need to find and access the data sources that can provide the information you need. Depending on your objectives, you may use internal or external data sources, or a combination of both. Internal data sources are those that come from your own business operations, such as sales, inventory, customer feedback, or web analytics. External data sources are those that come from outside your business, such as market research, industry reports, competitor analysis, or social media trends. You need to ensure that your data sources are reliable, relevant, and up-to-date.

3 Select your visualization methods

After you have collected and cleaned your data, you need to decide how to visualize it in a way that is easy to understand and meaningful for your audience. There are many types of data visualization methods, such as bar charts, line charts, pie charts, scatter plots, heat maps, histograms, or treemaps. Each method has its own strengths and weaknesses, depending on the type and amount of data you have, and the message you want to convey. For example, if you want to show the distribution of your merchandise sales by category, you may use a pie chart or a treemap. If you want to show the trend of your merchandise sales over time, you may use a line chart or a bar chart.

4 Share your findings

The final step is to share your data visualization with your team and stakeholders, and use it to inform your decision making and action planning. You need to make sure that your data visualization is clear, concise, and compelling. You should use titles, labels, legends, colors, and annotations to highlight the main points and explain the context. You should also provide a summary or a conclusion that summarizes the key takeaways and implications of your data visualization. For example, if your data visualization shows that your merchandise sales are declining in a certain region, you should explain why that is happening and what you can do to improve it.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?