Ecommerce thrives now like no other time
With 2020 continuing to be one of the biggest surprise years in recent history, commerce in the world has continued to adapt and change alongside with it. Retail integration must be easy and efficient. According to a recent article published using U.S. Census data here, we are seeing record levels in the ecommerce space like:
More than $1 in every $5 was spent online in Q2 2020–the highest ecommerce penetration of any quarter or year on record.
Even more interesting is that Q2 2020’s performance also was more than triple the ecommerce growth registered in Q2 2019 as well as Q1 2020. The numbers show that consumers went “all in” for purchasing online (not surprising as they did not have much of a choice). It is fascinating, on the other hand that we did not hear much about “systems crashing” and getting overloaded during this time. Nice work to those that stood the influx of transactions and delivered on the increased demand!
This huge increase in ecommerce was great for companies that were ready for it by having their platform of choice already in place along with the proper infrastructure to scale with this amazing upward trend. However, if you or your company did not have an ecommerce present and in place during this time, all is not lost! The second half of 2020 is looking promising. Retail integration must be easy and efficient in order to companies to thrive.
So much ecommerce, now what?
Great question! Now that we have record highs of online transactions and user engagement, we can look toward how to benefit from this in many was such as:
- Increase revenue across multiple product lines from a channel that is available 24/7.
- Transactional data that we can use for forecasting and predicting future sales. Possibly mix in a some statistical sampling and AI to get this really spot on.
- User engagement metrics that we obtain from things like Google Analytics.
- Our ecommerce metrics and automation that is in place such as our warehouse/labor costs, pick time, etc.
- The timing of orders by hour to see how it correlates to our marketing campaigns, promotions and social media awareness.
All of these metrics and data points will most likely be spread out across multiple system and applications. Gearproxy can help with bringing all this data together into a single, Business Intelligence (BI) platform for reporting and analysis purposes.
Retail integration must be easy and efficient for analysis and reporting
The following example is how Gearproxy is able to handle a very common ecommerce scenario that involves Shopify as the ecommerce platform, Tableau as the BI platform and Google Drive for saving invoices.
Given the above diagram, the following flows is at play:
- An order is placed on within Shopify by your customer.
- Gearproxy then pulls the order details from the order and sends them over into the Tableau data storage and saves the information.
- Following the orders details getting saved, an invoice is then stored inside Google Drive for for later reference.
- Gearproxy then pulls all newly invoiced orders into the Tableau data stored to be reported and analyzed in a single, consolidated weekly sales analytics dashboard.
To summarize
Retail integration must be easy and efficient for all ecommerce organizations. As with many processes a business needs to handle and maintain today, ecommerce should be high on the priority list for any retailer. In order to have this process flow seamlessly, one should consider all areas it will touch and how best to share data among those areas. Without a proper plan data silos will be created and you may end up with bigger problems than what you originally set out to solve.
