Retailers have always managed to access consumer data through transactions and surveys. But with the advent of social media, it’s possible for retailers to predict consumer behavior, allowing them to focus more on the right product for the right consumer in the right location. This is possible due to Big Data, a technology which uses simple user data such as user transactions, purchase history, browsing history, social media platforms activity, demographic data, enterprise data, even simple data like how long does a specific set of consumers look at a particular item before purchase and how many items they choose before finalizing their choice.
 
The data list is endless and varies with the type of market, purchase item, the age of the consumer, geography and many other factors. Hence, retailers are left with endless amount of user data, which Big Data technology helps to transform into useful intelligence, aimed at boosting the sales and profits and the customer experience.
 
There are numerous success stories of retailers who have used Big Data to edge out the competition. Many experts cite Big Data as a key to boost the department’s success. The extent of success of any retail industry that uses big data relies largely upon identifying and arranging meaningless data to produce useful patterns and cases, which you can easily apply to your business model. But as the size of the industry increases, so does its customer base and this really makes the job of identifying business cases extremely complex.
 
So the absence of proper data and more importantly the failure to identify more important cases may result in unfruitful results. This is why many business retailers see Big Data as a mere increased IT expenditure. But then again, there are many companies providing big data analytics service, including big names like IBM, which make use of every minute user detail available and have many clients like BestMart and Luxottica which attribute their increased marketing effectiveness to IBM’s Big Data Analytics programs.
 
Big Data has the capability to benefit retailers in every field of business, not just stores and marts. There are examples of hotel chains, which use Big Data to reach out to stranded travelers whose flight got cancelled, just by using weather data and flight cancellation information, or even financial services firm which turned to big data to identify client opportunities and increase investment. In a quite infamous retail example, retailer Target used information such as purchase history, credit card use, age, ethnicity, education, marital status, number of children and even the gradual changes in a specific set of eatables and pills purchased to identify whether a shopper was pregnant and thus reached out to them with proper baby care product promotions to increase its revenues manifold.
 
While some consumers see big data as a breach to their privacy, others are quite welcome to the idea of the commodities of their liking laid out especially for them. Big data has made it possible for smaller retailers to outperform the bigger ones on a number of occasions and the size of the retail industry and the budget of the IT department no longer hold the key to success, but it’s the ability to adapt and innovate that does.