Transforming Online Data Into Your Competitive Advantage

If you sell online you are likely investing substantial resources into e-commerce efforts. Your customers are the lifeblood of your business and the undying focus of your competitors’ efforts. 

Constantly changing trends, products, competitors and buyer behavior means you need more Intel than ever before to make well informed decisions. Gaining the advantage in a dynamic market means accurately assessing the environment and responding more quickly than your competition.

What products and brands do other sellers offer, for how much, how often and what new products are being introduced? What is customer sentiment and what items do buyers also shop? You likely have a lot of data but are you missing the Intel necessary to enable you to drive greater value into the market?

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), web analytics and digital marketing data provide a great deal of information but they don't tell you everything you need to know. Harvesting public online data provides a vital source of real-time, ongoing data about your environment not available elsewhere.

1. Product Mix

Product mix is a key characteristic to better understanding your offerings and how they compare with your competitors. Harvesting and analyzing product data across categories and subcategories enables you to assess your company's product mix compared to others.

Trending items with higher amounts of change in stock levels and capturing "also consider", “also viewed” or "also purchased" data provides valuable insight into mix and promotional opportunities. How does what the market is buying compare to your offering? Notice the category mix similarities and differences between competitors below. A subcategory analysis would reveal more detailed product mix insights.

2. Demand

Understanding demand is a key factor in driving incremental growth and customer reactivation. So much so that improving decision making around current and future demand can be the difference between top performing companies and laggards.

Using new product arrival data allows you to monitor and trend changes by category, subcategory or reseller. Additional information gained through new vs used product availability could provide insight into general product replacement behavior, life cycle or even diversification opportunity.

Monitoring the rate and pace at which products in a particular category are in/out of stock further enables you to prioritize the products and categories to focus on. Notice the difference in rate of change in new product arrivals below. Combining sales, promotional and demand data could yield valuable Intel into product life cycle for forecasting purposes.

3. Pricing Strategy

Buyers can easily compare prices before making a final purchase which makes your pricing strategy paramount. Determining how to price products means you must be able to continually understand how your pricing compares to a changing market.

Analyzing the median price data by category, for example, provides benchmarks to help determine your pricing strategy relative to competitors. Layering in discount data as a share of total inventory can provide Intel into your competitors strategy as well as insights into how they are performing.

Trending pricing data enables you to better understand how much you could or should be charging as well as time of the year or month to run promotions. In the following chart you will notice that your company occupies the highest price position in most categories.

If you are experiencing poor sales conversion performance or high customer churn this could be a contributing factor. Analyzing product mix provides greater Intel into what specific changes are necessary.

4. Company & Product Sentiment

Your competitors’ sites and others are rich with customer comments, product reviews, questions and answers. It is said that perception is reality and harnessing sentiment data can yield valuable insights into how the market perceives your company, your products and your competitors.

Analyzing comment and review data provides valuable voice of the customer information to uncover sentiment, keyword and key phrase Intel to help drive digital and content marketing efforts.

Harvesting product rating and comment data from your site and others may reveal that customers are positive about your products but neutral to negative towards your customer service. How would you use this knowledge to drive change? Sentiment data provides even greater insights when unified with product mix, demand and pricing data.

5. Channel Management & Grey Market Policing

Ensuring that channel partners are adhering to pricing, promotion and brand standards is extremely difficult in online environments. Regularly harvesting data from sites that channel partners sell through enables you to gain the data needed to determine if your partners are consistently acting properly.

It can be difficult to police cases where resellers must abide to not selling products through sites like eBay, Amazon or others. Harvesting data from these sites provides an efficient solution to identify grey market resellers and provide management with the information needed to take corrective action or examine the impact of grey marketing sales.

6. Data Science & Machine Learning

Utilizing algorithms and statistics to identify patterns that simply can’t be discovered by other means enables you to further leverage harvested web data far beyond the examples discussed above.

The more data you have from your environment the more value you can drive into your market and the greater your advantage. Data Science and Machine Learning (ML) is the combination that brings data together, enriches it and allows you generate the Intel needed to make predictions and take action.

Whether predicting customer turn-over, customer lifetime value, which customers are likely to buy which products, market/customer segmentation or analyzing customer sentiment, machine learning transforms data into the advantage you need in today’s competitive environment.

Parting Thoughts

While these examples do not represent your total potential, they do provide a starting point to begin discussions and help explore possibilities. The real progress starts when you prioritize your specific needs into a strategic plan.

What Intel do you need? when do you need it and what will it mean to your business to drive greater value into your market?

Data harvesting specialists, data science and machine learning experts give you the one-two punch needed to programmatically extract and transform data into the Intel you need, when you need it; freeing your resources to put knowledge into action.

Punch above your weight by gaining a competitive advantage not easy replicated by the competition. Why wait? gain Tomorrow's Knowledge Today!

~ Bill King, Founder - King Innovative?