Role Of Big Data In Retail Sector

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LIMITATIONS OF BIG DATA IN RETAIL
While Big data has been pronounced as the next big thing in the retail sector and in fact with respect to its applications in the marketing space in almost every sector, one wonders whether the applications are actually relevant or is it too soon to be using this by the retailers. The Gartner’s Hype Cycle, as of last August, has placed ‘Big data’ near the tip of inflated expectations which is about to fall into the trough if disillusionment. While it is proven that Big data does have hold valuable relevance in the retail sector, however the limitations should be taken into consideration while employing big data to use in the retail sector.
With many of the big retailers enjoying the benefits of using big data, …show more content…

It is clear that consumers often use much more information than just the price of the product while making a decision to purchase a particular product. The amount of information than the brain processes while making a purchase us phenomenal, these being driven by various cognitive, social and behavioral cues. While sophisticated architecture may be able to capture the volumes of data to decipher a probable promotional strategy, even they will not be able to capture all the fine nuances which affect a purchasing decision, hence making it difficult to predict a promotional offer which has a high probability of working.

The answer is to follow the approach which e-commerce sites have successfully employed that is using structured experiments to find new possible effective promotional strategies. Tailored data for deriving effective promotions in retail is the answer to the above limitations.

Other more generic limitations of using big data and its applications which are also applicable to the retail sector are:
1) Dearth of qualified people to carry out the processes involved in big data mining and analysis
2) The possibility of infringing upon consumer’s privacy
3) Incomplete customer data
4) Lack of …show more content…

What was earlier an experiment is now a long term investment with vast payoffs.
Big Data is revolutionizing the retail Industry in the following ways:
1. Making sense of the vast amount of data that is available not only from the conventional demographic customer databases, but also from the social media, interactions with call centers, purchase history etc.
2. Investment in centralized databases to focus on data hygiene and analytics is increasing. Cost of storage devices is rapidly reducing.
3. Optimizing the Omni channel approach by using customer behavior data to gain insights about better ways to serve customers
4. Personalized selling has improved, as retailers adapt sales techniques and communication channels according to customer preferences and life

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