Today’s Cloud-based e-fulfilment systems can provide powerful new insights into customer spending patterns down to the smallest detail, helping retailers play detective with their data. Want to know where the greatest demand for fish food is coming from, or which town in the UK spends most on health food? A real time Cloud-based e-fulfilment system can perform the data processing required – revealing instantly which towns prefer granola to gravy.
When customers buy goods online, they may not think much about the bit between placing the order and the goods being shipped, but sophisticated fulfilment systems exist to ensure the purchases are in the right place at the right time. By employing ‘big data’ analysis techniques built into e-fulfilment systems, the retailer has a powerful new source of customer insight.
When customers shop online, cloud-based e-fulfilment software can automatically store and analyse every detail of the transaction, and this data can be ‘mined’ by retailers to allow even small variations in demand to be spotted and analysed with remarkable accuracy – and all in real time.
For example, when James and James looked at sales data from over 30,000 UK online transactions for one retail client, Newcastle upon Tyne emerged as the place most focused on health with 43% containing health food products or supplements. Liverpool came in second with 42%, followed by Bolton at 41%. The highest placed southern city was Plymouth which was placed seventh. London did not make it into the top 30, languishing down at 10%. Just for fun of course, but
Such results can be achieved quickly and easily using a real-time data-driven environment – part of the Big Data revolution. The creators of the cloud-based software-driven approach believe this can help e-retailers to satisfy customer demand faster, and to react more quickly to changes in demand, right down to regional level.
Using an outsourced warehouse operation with real time fulfilment system, smaller retailers can have the sort of insight that would have taken weeks of data gathering or market research in just a few minutes. They have more information than if the fulfilment operation were in-house. The system is quickly scalable as demand increases, allowing retailers to bring on more warehouses in a matter of days.
There should be no additional privacy problem, as the retailer already knows a customer’s individual spending pattern, only the aggregate data is being analysed to reveal powerful insights into spending patterns and trends.
The sophisticated technology integration with multiple online shops, accounting packages and customer databases, and allows logistics to be completely automated, meaning smaller retailers can see benefits normally available only to very big businesses.
James Hyde is Founder and Operations Director of e-fulfilment service provider James and James Fulfilment. www.ecommercefulfilment.com
