Retail Analytics Solution Development – Comprehensive Guide

Updated 26 Apr 2023
Published 26 Apr 2023
Satyam Chaturvedi 2238 Views
Retail Data Analytics

The retail market has been the backbone of the global economy for many decades. With rapid globalization and digitalization, it has become the centerpiece of the world economy in no time.

However, with each passing day, the fundamental process of supplying to meet customer demand has been changing.

Retail economics is becoming complicated as consumer demands are highly dynamic, the market is fluctuating and unstable, and the narrowing profit margins are pushing new constraints and restrictions on the market players. However, retailers can use a Business Intelligence solution to an

analyze sales patterns and consumer behavior and make effective business models and strategies to enhance their business operations and revenue.

This solution is known as Retail Data Analytics.

What is Retail Analytics software?

Well, it is software that enables retailers to avail an in-depth insight into all aspects of their retail business. It offers them thorough analytical data and precise analysis, that can assist them to take strategic and more informed decisions.

What is Retail Analytics software

It allows them to analyze retail KPIs (key performance indicators) such as the average transaction size, total sales volume, rate of return, and retail conversion rate with a single click.

It allows the managers and analysts to overview the organization’s real-time performance across all the business units and regions.

Retail analytics solutions also help retailers in identifying and analyzing customers’ data and uncover which product is selling well, and which product is performing less, along with their sales figures based on demography.

It also allows them to evaluate shopping patterns and determine consumer trends, formulate effective sales strategies, and offer better consumer loyalty programs.

A retail analytics solution can be integrated with various other software, such as retail management software, retail operations solution, and retail POS systems to fetch the data in real-time.

A retail analytics solution must have the following capabilities:

  • It must monitor the KPIs and perform retail data prediction
  • Act as a unified database to create enterprise-ready reports
  • Must be designed for wholesale and retail businesses
  • Capable of integrating with other retail solutions
  • Should have the ability to gather, cleanse, organize, and analyze the retail data
  • Offer Power BI data visualization and real-time analytics via intelligent dashboards

How Does Retail Analytics Work?

Retail analytics works in multiple ways involving sales evaluation, customer analysis, assessing historical data, and many more. Here is how Retail Analytics works:

How Does Retail Analytics Work

Analyze Historical Data

This analysis helps retailers to know about their best-selling products, and provides them with information about the customers who have spent the most, what is their characteristics, profile, and spending pattern.

This crucial information will assist retailers with optimizing their product placement, and marketing initiatives and improve their service delivery to their customers.

Analyze Current Audience

Here retailers can use AI/ML, Big Data technologies to capture and analyze customers’ movement and behavioral patterns via IP cameras placed around product displays and shelves. Retail Analytics fetch the data and measure the gender, attention, and mood of the customer.

It breakdown the data into multiple aspects to offer a wide range of insights about product offerings, advertising, and store layout to improve customer loyalty and engagement.

Analyze Current Audience

Use Human Insights

Technology allows you to fetch customer behavior, but you can’t completely ignore customer feedback. Your business must listen to your customers, fetch their feedback and take corrective actions.

Retail Analytics helps you gather this information from multiple sources and then transform it into actionable insights with the help of its effective algorithms.

 

What are the types of Retail Analytics?

We have four types of Retail data analytics available, and each one has a different use case and advantages. Let’s understand each one of them in detail.

What Are the Types of Retail Analytics

  • Descriptive Analytics

It acts as a foundation for more complex and refined types of analytics, including the other type of analytics mentioned in this blog. Descriptive analytics addresses the fundamental questions of “what, when, where, and how many. It provides a plethora of power BI dashboards that offer weekly reports on inventory and sales levels.

  • Diagnostic Analytics

It enables retail enterprises to determine and analyze underlying issues that may be impacting their productivity and performance. It amalgamates data from various sources, such as financial performance, operational metrics, and customer feedback. It helps retailers to gain a thorough insight into the root causes of issues they are experiencing.

  • Predictive Analytics

It helps retailers to foresee future events based on numerous variables, such as economic trends, competitive pressures, emerging technology trends, weather conditions, and supply chain interruptions.

This analytics follows what-if analysis, which enables enterprises to understand and predict the action if a certain condition is met or not met.

Predictive Analytics

  • Prescriptive Analytics

It uses emerging technologies such as Big Data and AI to perform analysis and predict recommended outcomes. It suggests various offers to the customer care executives, which they can pass on to the customers.

It fetches various insights based on the customer’s purchase history, which enables organizations to offer a personalized experience, improve cross-selling, and enhance overall customer satisfaction.

Read more: Top Power BI Consulting Companies in 2023

Why Develop a Retail Analytics Solution for Your Company?

A retail analytics solution can single-handedly transform the way your enterprise functions and performs sales. It comes with a plethora of tools, that can help you improve revenue and margins, and reduce operational overhead and labor costs without much effort.

Here are some important benefits you can expect by implementing the Retail Analytics solution for your organization:

Why Develop a Retail Analytics Solution for Your Company

Decreasing Stockouts & Discounts

Retail analytics solutions can help you comprehend consumer demand patterns so that your organization can have adequate product inventory in hand so that you must not resort to offering steep discounts to sell your excess inventory. It helps you to track the dynamic of demands driven by your marketing campaigns.

Enhancing User Personalization

Retail Analytics enables retailers and businesses to analyze their customers’ preferences and purchasing patterns, which helps them capture more customers by catering to their demands.

For example, by analyzing a customer’s purchasing history, a fashion retailer can send a personalized alert to its customers who have shown interest in a specific type of clothes.

Making Better Pricing Decisions

Retail Analytics allows retailers to set the optimal prices for their products by considering various factors, such as competitive pricing information, cost of goods sold, and abandoned shopping carts. This helps retailers in maximizing their profits by setting the right prices to capture more customers than their competitors.

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Refining Product Allocations

Retail Analytics enables retailers to efficiently allocate their products in numerous geographic regions, stores, and distribution centers. It not only reduces the needless logistics cost by also decreases the overall operational overheads.

For example, a sports merchandise retailer can utilize analytics to determine the effect of local weather on the sale of thermal undershirts, which allows them to allocate more such items to a store that falls in a geographic area with the specific weather condition.

Retail Analytics Software – Market Size & Statistics

Retail analytics comprises advanced technologies like Big data and Data mining to examine the huge dataset and fetch meaningful business insights.

It helps businesses to make efficient strategies to improve their workflows, which ultimately optimize their sales performance, improve their revenue generation, and recognize market trends and customer preferences to drive business growth.

Retail Analytics Software - Market Size & Statistics

Retail analytics solutions aided with AI (artificial intelligence) can simply transform the way businesses interact with their customers. Here are some important Retail Analytics software market size and statistics.

  • The global retail analytics market size was $5.84 billion in 2021, and it will surpass $18.33 billion by 2028.
  • It will witness a healthy CAGR of 17.7% during the 2021-2028 period.
  • The market was impacted due to COVID, but now the demand is rising and it has reached pre-pandemic in no time.
  • The growing e-commerce industry, increasing penetration of mobile services, and more usage of AI/Big Data will drive the overall growth of the retail analytics market in the world.

Retail Analytics Implementations – Most Valued Use Cases 

Here are some most valued Use Cases of Retails Analytics implementation :

Retail Analytics Implementations - Most Valued Use Cases

Behavioral Analytics

If you want to optimize the in-store and online experience of your customers, then you must understand how they move through the retail space, offline and online.

Various retail analytics solutions allow you to identify the point of interest, customer traffic density across floorspace and on the website, and their navigation patterns, that too in real-time.

Such Behavioral analytics helps retailers to make data-based and relevant decisions to re-design the in-store and online customer experience.

Instead of depending on the best practices, retailers can make changes in the floor layouts or website layouts to match the customer’s behavioral patterns.

This allows retailers to significantly improve the effectiveness of commercial and web spaces.

Recommendation Engines

Retailers have been using analytics to track their customers’ behavior to offer personalized product recommendations.

Amazon is the biggest beneficiary of this use case, and now modern technologies such as AI/ML, and AR/VR are also providing a level playing field for small and medium-sized enterprises by deploying these analytics to measure their customer’s purchasing behavior.

By evaluating customer purchasing behavior and forecasting future demands, retailers can provide highly personalized product or service recommendations to improve in-store and online shopping experiences.

Personalized recommendations can significantly enhance customer engagement, which ultimately boosts the sales and revenue of a retailer.

Recommendation Engines

Inventory Optimization

It is important to optimize the balance between demand and supply to upkeep your inventory management. Professionals can now leverage massive datasets and retail analytics solutions to make stocking decisions.

For example, Kroger which is one of the largest grocers in the USA has been using an in-house analytics team to examine customer behavior and economic trends to accurately predict demand for years.

Retail Analytics enables retailers to anticipate inventory requirements by using real-time customer flow statistics to anticipate inventory needs. It allows retailers to get the data and insights immediately, without relying on historical data to predict demand.

This model also helps organizations where customer behavior is unprecedented or unpredictable, which we have seen during the COVID pandemic. Inventory optimization enables managers to discover trends and respond to their customers’ needs appropriately.

Inventory Optimization

Predictive Pricing

It has been an important aspect of the business from the beginning and increasing users of Big-data and analytical solutions have allowed retailers to have a better knowledge of it. Now, retailers can utilize multiple inputs to design and drive their pricing tactics.

These involve everything from conventional concepts like competitor pricing and cost of product sold to modern analytics such as real-time customer behavioral patterns and weather forecasts.

This crucial data can help retailers to predict customer price tolerance, and ideal sale duration, and capture various other components of their pricing strategy.

Smart Merchandising

From display optimization to online and offline promotions, merchandising has established itself as an effective process to sell retail products.

We can transform business performance drastically by combining customer behavior analytics and store-level data with AI/ML-driven analysis.

While by using AR/VR in shopping experiences, we can add another tier of actionable data for retailers, which helps them to devise their display strategies quickly.

AR experiences allow retailers to improve their product placements, signage, product displays, and other promotional collateral. This allows retailers to restate their campaigns cost-effectively and quickly before allocating substantial resources.

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Retail Analytics Solution Development: Key Modules

Retail analytics solution development involves the use of various modules to analyze and extract insights from retail data. Here are some key modules used in retail data analytics solution development:

Retail Analytics Solution Development Key Modules

Retail Data Processing & Storage

It stitches together disparate data, store it, and properly handle it, so that organization can use it for further analysis. It improves retailers’ capability to drive their operations effectively and make correct decisions to improve sales and revenue.

Retail Data Analysis & Reporting

This module could be used to collect and analyze retail data, such as inventory, pricing, sales, etc. to determine trends, and customer behavior, forecast sales, predict outcomes, and make well-informed business decisions.

Retail Data Analysis & Reporting

Supply Chain & Inventory Analytics

This module allows you to fetch and combine the data from a variety of data sources, then analyze it to gain important insights into the procurement, distribution, and processing of goods. It helps in streamlining the overall supply chain and inventory workflows.

Customer Analytics

It enables users to collect customer-specific data from different sources and analyze them to attract and maintain their customer base. This module allows businesses to draw crucial insights, develop useful products, deliver improved services, and make profitable and successful business decisions.

Pricing Analytics

This module enables retailers to use various metrics and tools to understand the impact of pricing activities on the business. It helps them in analyzing the profitability of product price points and devise an optimized pricing strategy to generate maximum revenue.

Sales Analytics

It helps the user to capture sales data and track sales performance. Sales professionals can use this module and associated metrics to set objectives, forecast future sales, enhance internal processes, and predict revenue effectively.

Sales Analytics

Marketing Analytics

This module helps retailers utilize the data to analyze the success and effectiveness of their marketing initiatives. Marketing analytics enables your business to muster consumer insights, improve your marketing goals, and avail enhanced ROI (return on investment). Marketing analytics can help both customers and marketers alike.

Assortment & Merchandising Analytics

It is also known as Range analysis, which allows retailers to take an overview of all of their segments. It offers crucial insights for your product management, which allows you to compare your products with your competitors and take corrective actions for improvement.

Read more: Benefits of Power BI for Revolutionizing Industries

Custom Retail Analytics V/s Off-the-shelf Analytics Software

Off-the-shelf retail analytics software could be implemented immediately or after a brisk customization process. These tools are developed to address a specific set of business functions or purposes.

Usually, the target audience for such software is global and it addresses the needs of a wide range of industries and domains. Tibco Spotfire, Tableau, and Microsoft Power BI are a few examples of off-the-shelf software. This software is well-tested, frequently updated, and well-supported by the Power BI developer’s communities.

However, off-the-shelf software may not meet all your business requirements, as your business may have some unique set of needs, which require a higher level of customization.

To address such concerns, it is important to develop a custom solution, which can cater to the unique requirements of your business.

Selecting a custom retail analytics solution ensures that all your unique needs are matched and it also offers you a massive competitive advantage in the market.

Solution Type Pros Cons
Custom Retail Analytics i) Tailored to match your unique business needs.

ii) Offer unmatched competitive edge

iii) Complete control over the solution development process

iv) More flexibility

v) Faster updates

i) High initial cost

ii) Lengthy Development process

iii) Risks of selecting technological risks

iv) Unpredictability

v) Lack of community support

Off-the-shelf Analytics i) Ready-made solution

ii) Rapid implementation

iii) Low initial cost

iv) Availability of a wide number of vendors

v) Wider Community and Developer support

i) Few options for customization

ii) Alteration in the development process to fit the software design

iii) No control over the solution development process

iv) unwanted hard-coded features

v) Hidden fees and expenditures

Top Platforms to Build Retail Analytics

There are many platforms available for building retail analytics solutions. Here are some of the top platforms:

Top Platforms to Build Retail Analytics

Microsoft Power BI

It comes with built-in retail analytics samples, that contain reports, datasets, and dashboards that analyze the data of retail sales across multiple geographies and stores.

It offers numerous metrics such as year-on-year sales, gross margin, units, new-store analysis, and variance to keep a check on sales performance.

Azure Synapse Analytics

It is an enterprise analytics service that fast-tracks data insight across big data systems and data warehouses. It makes the best use of SQL technologies used in Apache Spark technologies and enterprise data warehousing for big data processing, and Azure Data Explorer to perform log and time analytics.

Read more: Understanding Microsoft Power BI: A Comprehensive Guide

Tools & Technologies We Use to Develop Retail Analytic Solutions

We follow an agile and incremental development approach to design a full-fledged Retail analytics solution. We kick-start the process by building an MVP (minimum viable product) with core functionalities.

We use the following Tools to develop a successful retail analytics solution:

  • Frameworks: Vue.JS, AngularJS, Yii2, Bootstrap, and jQuery
  • Front-end Development: JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
  • Back-end Development: Java, PHP, and Ruby
  • Database Management: MongoDB, MySQL, HBase, and PostgreSQL
  • Web servers: Linux, Apache
  • Cloud servers: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud
  • Native Application: Kotlin (Android) and Swift (iOS)
  • Cross-platform App: Flutter, React.js, and React Native
  • Push notifications: Twilio and Apple push notifications
  • AI and Machine Learning: AWS SageMaker and Azure Machine Learning.

Technologies to be used:

  • Big Data
  • Cloud computing
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Machine
  • Data Science
  • Predictive analysis

Looking for a Robust Data Analytics Solution That Can Take Care of All Your Inventory Optimization Needs

How Arka can assist you in Developing & Implementing a Retail Analytic Solution?

Arka Softwares is a renowned player in the Retail Analytics solution development space. We can enhance your merchandise intelligence by analyzing your customer behavior, tracking your assortment and inventory, and spotting some missed opportunities.

We boost your sales via effective location planning, which can help you to build strategic and efficient sales promotions.

Our seasoned experts can help you assess the market movement and make correct predictions to make well-informed decisions. As a result, your organization will have better control over the stocks and customer behavior.

It will certainly help you avail better profit margins and offer a path-breaking experience to your customers and help them experience a successful journey. Our consultants can also help you with an in-depth analysis of your products and transactions across multiple channels.

FAQs Related to Retail Data Analytics

        • How can Retail Data Analytics Transform our Business?

          Retail data analytics enables organizations to fetch customer recommendations based on their purchase history and interaction, which results in highly personalized shopping experiences and enhanced customer service. These massive datasets also allow organizations to forecast trends and make well-informed strategic decisions based on in-depth market analysis.

        • How can BI and Retail Data Analytics Improve our Sales?

          BI and Retails Data Analytics can help you in enhancing your sales with the help of:
          ● Predict your customers purchasing behavior.
          ● Discover popular and weak products or services.
          ● Improved segmentation.
          ● Pricing structure optimization.
          ● Task automation.
          ● Spot-slipping customers.
          ● Track customer engagement trends.

        • What sort of Challenges an Organization may face while Implementing Retail Data Analytics?

          Your organization may face the following challenges while implementing retail data analytics:
          ● Accurate data collection
          ● Developing trust among the customers
          ● Usage of modern technologies
          ● Complying With Data Protection laws and standards
          ● Keeping Pace With the market competition

      • What does Retail Data Analytics Primarily focus on?

        Retail data analytics is focused on offering actionable insights related to inventory, sales, customers, marketing, and various other critical aspects important for any organization while making crucial and strategic decisions.

      • What type of Database is used for Retail Data Analytics?

        You can use an OLAP database for Retail data analytics. It is an online database utilized to prepare reports and analyses that are efficient and faster than conventional databases. An OLAP database allows the storage of multidimensional and aggregated data, with multiple data attributes to perform a thorough analysis of information.

Satyam Chaturvedi

Satyam Chaturvedi is a Digital Marketing Manager at Arka Softwares, a leading app development company dealing in modern and futuristic solutions. He loves to spend his time studying the latest market insights.

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