Analytics for internet transactions is how one keeps track of all user interactions with a seller’s page/website. If you own an independent website as a seller and want to gather numbers for it, Google Analytics is your best friend. Google Analytics captures real time data and presents it in a format that can help drive the evolution of your online product by miles. This data can be anything – amount of product sold, type of products sold, geographic or demographic categorization of sales reports, etc. Linking your website with your Gmail account and accessing the ‘Ecommerce’ tab within Google Analytics gives you the power to track, measure, collect and collate valuable data about your online selling operation. The official Google Analytics Blog is a good place to start learning about it. On the other hand, if you are an online retailer and utilize one or many online selling platforms like eBay, Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, etc. to sell your product, then you have to rely on the analytics tools that these websites offer you. But this can be inefficient, since the analytic tools these websites provide might not be enough for your purposes. Also, as a multi-channel online seller, you would prefer all your data in one accessible place, rather than having to control multiple sets of data in different places. Hence, you should look for a multi-channel online sales management system that is comprehensive enough to provide you with a great analytics dashboard. This solves all your major problems, since your stock, sales and inventory data is pooled into one place, which is easy to keep an eye on.

So what do you do once you gather all that data? Scroll down to view 6 tips that will help you a long way in making sense of analytics for you online sales business.

Using Analytics to Increase Online Sales

1. Think Macro, not Micro

The thing with data analysis and optimization is that the bigger your data pool, the closer you get to accuracy in your results. Therefore, do not make drastic strategic decisions based on premature numbers. Be patient enough to let the data accumulate and you get clean peaks and troughs in your analysis. Data behaves differently when looked at from different perspectives. Evaluate the data with respect to different metrics such as time, traffic sources and products, trying to find common patterns.

2. Do a Root Cause Analysis

Remember that any anomaly within the data – whether a positive or a negative one, has an inherent cause. Your job is to remove the root cause for the negative anomalies and bank on the positive ones. For example, if your sales data says that a certain product is not doing well on one channel but is flourishing on another, the root cause for this phenomenon might be unreliable content, product overflow or unfavourable customer reviews. Once you pinpoint the root cause, you can correct it and make your online sales record better.

3. Markets are Seasonal, Geographic and Demographic

This means that the sales data that you have accumulated is, too. Thus, you can look forward to certain changes in the data according to changes in season, economy and other variants. At the same time, with a good analytics tool, you can look at geography and demography based sales for your products. With this information in hand, you can now employ various strategies like sales and discounts during lucrative time periods and make the most out of your online sales platforms.

4. Anticipate the Future

Data analytics helps you to anticipate market changes and react to them before they actually hit. By extrapolating your data to a future time frame, you can be prepared for events like stock refurbishment, catalogue changes and customer service. What is important is finding patterns within the information at hand. For example, festivals usually mean increase in sales. But what products are likely to see this increase? and approximately how much? during a long festival, which days are likely to see a hike in sales? Once you know the answers to these questions, you can prepare in advance for the event – by advertising and promoting your product on one side and readying your stock on the other.

5. Keep Track of Your Competition

On every online sales channel, an average retailer will face many competitors with same or similar products. You must study them carefully to find out who is moving the most volume or achieving the best prices, and why. What are the best practices that they are employing to be able to sell the same product better? By keeping an eye on past and present seller information, you can look out for vacant product areas and demands that you can then set out to fill.

6. Do Not Over Rely on Your Data

Yes, there is such a thing as unexplained anomalies. Data processing and optimization is a tricky field which is dependent on a vast number of metrics. It is a bad practice to make exclusively data based decisions, especially since it is extremely expensive and virtually impossible to gain access to every data point of the sales processes. Thus, be wary of over-reliance on analytics. Use it as a supportive tool towards your strategic and operational decision making processes, not as an exclusive solution.

So, this was a quick take on how to look at your sales data and utilize it in your strategy. To know more about using analytics to increase profitability in online sales, get in touch with us at Browntape. We are the leading multi-channel sales management service providers in India, and we are always willing to help you make the most of your online selling process.