Main Body
One of the major uses of the Amazon’s Big Data is to provide the customers with recommendations. When the customers’ looks forward for a product in their website or mobile based applications, Amazon’s Big Data save those data from the customers in the database and later the recommendations are provided top the customers based on their searches. With the help of the procedure of consumer analytics the business decisions are made by the companies with the help of the data obtained from the customer behaviour. These data are implemented by the companies in order to make direct marketing plans, plan for a good consumer relationship management as well as planning for site selection (Erevelles et al., 2016). This consumer analytics is the major element for the Big Data Revolution which is used by the companies of many retail online businesses. Amazon is one of the most important online retail businesses, which focuses upon Big Data, which are mainly the real time data that helps to plan the marketing strategies of the business by understanding the behaviour of the consumers (McAfee et al., 2012).
This report will focus upon Amazon, UK which is one of the largest online organizations to use Big Data and generate customer analytics with the help of which they make their marketing decisions and enhance the productivity of the business.
With the globalization of the businesses and influence of the technological developments there are many online businesses which came up as a result and as there are no direct contact between the sellers and the buyers, these online companies make use of Big Data in order to generate consumer analytics., the customers analytics are used by these businesses in order to know about the behaviour of the customers and make plans and strategy for the marketing of the products and services accordingly (Minelli et al., 2012).
In order to know that how the online giant
Amazon uses big data, first of all it is significant to know that what Big Data is and it has been described by IBM (2012) that big data is combination of data generated by the customers nowadays in the technological era is of many types which includes behavioural data, traditional, transactional as well as structured data (Zikopoulos et al., 2011). Oracle (2012) further stated that, Big Data have mainly three dimensions which include variety, volume and velocity.
The volume of data refers to the amount of data that can be stored in the database. During traditional times, data were mostly text data but nowadays there are many forms of data like videos, images and so on which needs huge storage space and for that reason, it is believed that an organization can have Petabytes and Terabytes of data stored in their Big Data system (Lu te al., 2014). Amazon is such a company which have big data storage system of their customers and can be utilized whenever necessary.
Customer Focus
A variety of data can be stored in the company database which can help the company in effective decision making (Zaslavsky et al., 2013). For instance, the behavioural data about the customers stored in the company database can help the company to make effective marketing decision regarding which product needs to be promoted to which customers. There are a lot of varieties of data in a Big Data database of a company which includes relational database management system (RDBMS), XML, Images, Text, SMS as well as Unstructured.
The velocity of data refers to the quickness of the decision making process. Some data are there in the database which requires more time for the purpose of decision making by intensive research upon those data, while some data helps to make quick and effective decisions by the company for the purpose of increasing the productivity of the company. For instance, large sets of data which needs evaluation by intensive research are Australian Census Data while the data collected by Amazon can be used to make effective decisions which can be referred to as Big Data (Wang, 2015)
Source: blog.sqlauthority.com
Now coming to how Big Data is used by Amazon refers to how Amazon has successfully used Big Data through years and there are some points which have been mentioned below which shows that how Big Data is used by the company:
One of the major uses of the Amazon’s Big Data is to provide the customers with recommendations. When the customers’ looks forward for a product in their website or mobile based applications, Amazon’s Big Data save those data from the customers in the database and later the recommendations are provided top the customers based on their searches. While visiting Amazon website, there are specific and different columns that can be found by the customers stating, history of viewed products, additional recommendations and so on (Sagiroglu et al., 2013). With the help of Big Data, Amazon provides the customers with recommendations that can help them improve the buying experience of the customers and this provides a simple solution to all the problems of the customers. The Bid Data is the factor which views the customer on top of everything and when this ideology is implemented in the business, a business can succeed with the help of making use of Big Data (Provost et al., 2013).
The positive part of suing Big Data by Amazon is that they can know when the customer is searching for other website on the internet for the same product. Due to the implementation of one click ordering, the customers can search the other websites for a maximum of about 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, the product gets ordered on its own if the payment methods are linked with the account as well as the delivery address. The order gets delivered in the address and that is the benefit Amazon is taking from usage of Big Data.
One Click Order
While using big data, Amazon can know from the customer’s past orders that which is the product the customers are going to order next (Agrawal et al., 2013). From that anticipation, they send the products to the nearest warehouse or pick up stores. Thus it becomes really easy for Amazon to deliver the products in the quickest way to the customers and make the customers satisfied. Big Data uses analytics which are predictive in nature which helps Amazon to increase the sales of the business as well as the margin of revenue.
The price optimization that is a feature of Big Data also helps to pull the customers towards Amazon which is a huge plus point for the organization (Davenport et al., 2013). Discounts are offered in the products in order to generate sales of more products to the customers and earn more revenue. For instance, the price optimization feature of Big Data has helped Amazon to increase the revenue of the company by 10% each year since its implementation.
This is another major usefulness of Big Data that is used by Amazon. It is a human habit that whenever a customer receives a new product they becomes happy and as the manufacturers are linked with the company, Amazon track their shipment with the help of integrated supply chain management system from which the customers can check every time regarding their shipment and the arrival date (Schoenherr et al., 2015).
Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary which is under the brand Amazon which helps to deliver content, data warehousing, storage of data in databases, computation and a variety of other services (Varia et al., 2014). The processing is done with the help of Cloud-Based computing and the companies which take services from these web services are able to know the demographics of the customers, their habits to spend money and also other information which can prove to be beneficial for them. Thus, the retailers who take the services of Amazon Website Services can stalk the customers and it can increase the amount of data in the Amazon database and it can be sued by Amazon to deliver the services to the customers more effectively.
Thus Amazon with the help of extracting behavioural data about the customers is using it for their advantageous purpose. Big data however is helping Amazon in the following ways with the other online retail organization that is present online as mentioned below:
Anticipatory Delivery Model
Forbes (2013) stated that the customer analytics is the most accepted way for the purpose of taking marketing decisions than any other department decisions which is by 48%. The analytics of the customers helps the online retail businesses to segment the customers of the organizations based on their behaviour and also upon their age, gender, interest and other fields (Woerner et al., 2015). These data are combined by the online markets with that of the customer relationship management data from the social media searches in order to generate more value out of a customer in their lifetime and also improvement of the opportunities of sale process. According to reports of IDC, it has been estimated that technology analytics market will be growing by more 3.4 billion by 2019 than that is there in the present. With the help of improved business intelligence software, a large business as well as small online retail outlets can increase their sakes as well as generate revenue from the market.
Businesses like Amazon which have no direct contact with the seller for being online business have to invest heavily upon the technology so that they are able to improve the experience of the customers. It is according to a report that over 70% of the organizations that are there in the market have increased their spending upon the customers to enhance their shopping experience in the last few years (Fan et al., 2013).
The personalization concept that is followed by the businesses nowadays was also there during the traditional time but due to technological improvement after the globalization, the businesses are able to improve their real time support top the customers and thus this concept of real-time personalization has gained its ground. From the above discussion, it can be sated that, this is the relevance of the Big Data in order to uplift the experience of the customers with the help of sharing relevant information in the Home Page of the customers and showcasing the recommendations to the customers based on the search history in order to increase the sales of the company and also at the same time enhancing customers experience (Assunção et al., 2015).
The data that are related to the customer analytics are collected from the market in order to provide better personalized services to the customers. But in a recent survey it was found that less than 0.5% of data that are there in the company database are being used at the recent times. So, it is suggestible that the company should jump into Big Data in order to provide personalized customer experience to the customers (Gandomi et al., 2015). But, there are many big organizations which are of the opinion that once all the major companies accept this technology, they will to implement this technology in their business. But it is needless to say that this strategy of the large organizations that are not using Big Data in order to personalize the customer experience will not pay off in the long run. As many companies are adapting Big Data and personalizing the customer experience, the large organizations which till now haven’t adapted Big Data are losing out in the market due to the fact that customers like to shop in an environment which provides them with personalized shopping experience. As a result, the businesses without Big Data use are losing their revenue each year, relational benefits with the customers and also other benefits that are attached to it.
Optimization of Price
Due to the fact that Amazon made the correct use of Big Data, they saw a steep rise in the profit of the company through the years after Big Data introduction.
Conclusion:
From the discussion made above, it can be concluded that Big Data plays a significant role in the business in order to enhance the experience of the customers while they are shopping with online. Online retail businesses like Amazon collect the history of the product browsing of the customers and provide recommendation to the customers accordingly in order to make use of the customer experience (Calder et al., 2016). Thus shopping sites like Amazon with the help of providing personalizing shopping experience with the help of customer analytics increases their revenue from the market and is among one of the first company to revolutionize the use of Big Data.
While completing the assignment, there were a lot of terms that we came through and gain a lot of understating about how the retail industry uses the data that are collected from their websites with the help of customer browsing history. In order to complete this assignment, we have gone through a lot of articles related to the Big Data. We made internet searches and also went to library in order to collect data about the assignment. There were many internet searches made regarding the largest retail organization that makes effective use of Big Data and after that Amazon was selected as the organization. The first things that we did was to gain an understanding regarding the Big Data and also about the customers analytics. After that we went on to collect the data from the secondary sources like journals, magazines, books, online libraries and so on. The data thus collected were combined by us in order to give a meaning to the assignment “Big Data and Future of Marketing”.
References:
Erevelles, S., Fukawa, N. and Swayne, L., 2016. Big Data consumer analytics and the transformation of marketing. Journal of Business Research, 69(2), pp.897-904.
McAfee, A., Brynjolfsson, E. and Davenport, T.H., 2012. Big data: the management revolution. Harvard business review, 90(10), pp.60-68.
Minelli, M., Chambers, M. and Dhiraj, A., 2012. Big data, big analytics: emerging business intelligence and analytic trends for today’s businesses. John Wiley & Sons.
Zikopoulos, P. and Eaton, C., 2011. Understanding big data: Analytics for enterprise class hadoop and streaming data. McGraw-Hill Osborne Media.
Lu, R., Zhu, H., Liu, X., Liu, J.K. and Shao, J., 2014. Toward efficient and privacy-preserving computing in big data era. IEEE Network, 28(4), pp.46-50.
Zaslavsky, A., Perera, C. and Georgakopoulos, D., 2013. Sensing as a service and big data. arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.0159.
Wang, X., 2015. Learning from big data with uncertainty–editorial. Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, 28(5), pp.2329-2330.
Provost, F. and Fawcett, T., 2013. Data science and its relationship to big data and data-driven decision making. Big Data, 1(1), pp.51-59.
Sagiroglu, S. and Sinanc, D., 2013, May. Big data: A review. In Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS), 2013 International Conference on (pp. 42-47). IEEE.
Agrawal, D., Das, S. and El Abbadi, A., 2011, March. Big data and cloud computing: current state and future opportunities. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (pp. 530-533). ACM.
Davenport, T.H. and Dyché, J., 2013. Big data in big companies. International Institute for Analytics, p.3.
Schoenherr, T. and Speier?Pero, C., 2015. Data science, predictive analytics, and big data in supply chain management: Current state and future potential. Journal of Business Logistics, 36(1), pp.120-132.
Varia, J. and Mathew, S., 2014. Overview of amazon web services. Amazon Web Services.
Woerner, S.L. and Wixom, B.H., 2015. Big data: extending the business strategy toolbox. Journal of Information Technology, 30(1), pp.60-62.
Fan, W. and Bifet, A., 2013. Mining big data: current status, and forecast to the future. ACM sIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 14(2), pp.1-5.
Assunção, M.D., Calheiros, R.N., Bianchi, S., Netto, M.A. and Buyya, R., 2015. Big Data computing and clouds: Trends and future directions. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 79, pp.3-15.
Gandomi, A. and Haider, M., 2015. Beyond the hype: Big data concepts, methods, and analytics. International Journal of Information Management, 35(2), pp.137-144.
Calder, B.J., Malthouse, E.C. and Maslowska, E., 2016. Brand marketing, big data and social innovation as future research directions for engagement. Journal of Marketing Management, 32(5-6), pp.579-585.