Can E-commerce Analytics Give Your Business A Competitive Edge?

E-commerce businesses are finding more value in cloud-based business intelligence (BI) and key performance indicator (KPI) metrics when it comes to staying ahead of their competition. “Escalating competitive pressures and customer expectations are forcing organizations to find new ways to tap internal and external data sources to achieve their business goals,” an article on the E-Commerce Times website reports.

Companies of all sizes are discovering the robust insight and ease of use which cloud-based e-commerce analytics solutions have to offer. But what are some of the reasons businesses are moving to the cloud? For starters, Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions are more cost-effective and user-friendly. Furthermore, the article explains that “legacy systems have proven to be too complex and costly to address these issues and achieve these objectives.”

An application’s ease of use is essential for employees at all levels to be able to efficiently enter data. And it’s not enough just to have the data present in the system. An efficient e-commerce analytics implementation requires the ability to view the data in a way that is meaningful and can indicate a company’s successes and shortcomings.

“More user-friendly, Software as a Service solutions are making it easier for corporate end-users and executives to collate and share this information to make better important decisions,” the E-Commerce Times article notes. This is where cloud software and its more efficient BI and KPIs come in handy.

Dashboards, trend graphs and KPI metrics are the new face of BI. An executive of an e-commerce company must have the ability to quickly login to an application from anywhere in the world, view a dashboard and easily view his organization’s health and progress. This will invariably give him the useful information he needs to make important decisions on the direction of that business.

E-commerce analytics in the cloud also has a valuable interactive quality, with alerts to notify users when they are or are not meeting set goals. These goals can be user-defined or based on industry standards, but whatever the choice will be easily configured using cloud software. Now users on every level from employee to executive can benchmark success in comparison with peers and competitors.

NetSuite’s e-commerce solution comes with a built-in set of easy-to-use and comprehensive dashboards. With an easy click-and-drag interface, every user can have a customized dashboard showing only relevant and real-time data. With minimal or no customization at all, KPI scorecards and trend graphs can be configured to show executive level employees how the business is faring and prompt them when the company is exceeding or falling short of standards. This truly affords the superior visibility needed to excel in the fast-moving and constantly changing world of e-commerce.

“One of the basic principles of business management is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and you can’t measure what you can’t monitor,” the article reports. Cloud e-commerce analytics is making it possible to measure every aspect of a company’s data. Creating vital reports, relevant dashboards and KPIs is no longer the complex and costly endeavor it once was with legacy systems.

Source: E-commerce Times, May 2013