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Analysis and Optimization of Online Sales of Products

Dr. Zainab Pirani
Computer Eng. Dept., MHSSCOE
Mumbai, INDIA.
zainab.pirani@gmail.com

Anuja Marewar Zainab Bhavnagarwala Madhuri Kamble

Computer Eng. Dept., MHSSCOE Computer Eng. Dept., MHSSCOE Computer Eng. Dept., MHSSCOE
Mumbai, INDIA. Mumbai, INDIA. Mumbai, INDIA.
marewaranuja@gmail.com zainab.jbhavnagarwala@gmail.com kamblemadhuri.m@gmail.com

Abstract — The enormous number of e-commerce websites
in the market today has lead to the need of having an
analysis tools which helps determine whether the
organization is meeting its desired sales goals. With the
aim of developing a “Sales Analytics Tool” our paper
describes the need of a system to analyze the database
transactions of e-commerce websites using various data
mining techniques and algorithms such as affinity analysis,
logistic regression and linear regression. Our proposed
idea through this research paper is to develop a system
which takes input the database transactions of sold
products, segments the data obtained, analyzes the graphs
and extracts the market trends and product sales patterns.
After this, the system optimizes this data on the basis of
market requirements thereby improving sales and
merchandise planning in a way that to increase the overall
productivity and profits of the organization.
Keywords— Sales Analytics tool; data mining; affinity
analysis; logistic regression; linear regression; merchandise
planning.
I. INTRODUCTION
Online shopping is the most popular internet activity as it
provides a variety of products for consumers and sales
challenges for e-commerce players. We are in an era of
modern technology where each organization’s data plays a
crucial role which is now being measured in terabytes and may
further approach peta byte range [1]. There were 35 million
online shoppers in India in 2014 and is expected to cross 100
million mark by end of year 2016 [8].By 2020, India is
expected to generate $100 billion online retail revenue out of
which $35 billion will be through fashion e-commerce. Online
apparel sales are set to grow four times in coming years.[9]
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
E-commerce websites and online shopping are the upcoming
trends in today’s busy world. People buy and sell products by
just a single click. All e-commerce websites are in a race to
make their websites the best and increase their sales and
productivity. It is hence very essential to identify the
upcoming trends in online sale of products. In our system we
will perform analysis on the sales data using various data
mining techniques which gives us a valuable insight of the
inner -workings of Online Sales. Data mining will help to
analyze our systems database which will help us in generating
patterns of sales of products. The next step after obtaining
patterns of sales of products our system will work on
optimization of these sales. By optimizing the sales we can
manage our product inventory by stocking up the fast- selling
products and lowering prices or offering discounts on less-
selling products. This will indeed increase the overall
productivity and profits of our system.
Data mining [4]: Data mining is the abstraction of covert
information from large databases as it has a great potential to
help companies focus on the most important information in
their data warehouses. Organizations make proactive and
knowledge-driven decisions using data mining tools which
predict future trends and behaviors. Time consuming business
questions can be answered easily using these tools.
Extracting patterns from customer data and classifying them is
very important factor for business support and decision
making. Identifying newly emerging trends is needed in
business process. Sales patterns from inventory data indicate
market trends and can be used in forecasting which has great
potential for decision making, strategic planning and market
competition[1].Pattern analysis plays a crucial role for
merchandize planning because the patterns are studied and
ordered from the inventory accordingly[2][5].
We will analyze the database of our system which consists of
the products sold, combination of products sold together,
ratings of the products and reviews of the products. By
performing data analysis we will obtain the market trends and
the patterns in which the products are sold.
Product ratings are primarily used for comparison of one
product with another product. The product ratings indicate
which products are liked by the customers. Higher the rating
higher will be the demand for that product. Products are then
classified according to their rating and stocked up [3].
1. Affinity Analysis[7]:
It is a data analysis and mining technique that discovers co-
occurrence relationships among activities performed by (or
recorded about) specific individuals or groups. Affinity
analysis is used to perform market basket analysis, in which
organizations seek to understand the purchase behavior of
customers. The obtained data is then used to categorize fast
selling and slow selling products, thereby influencing sales
promotions, loyalty programs, store design, and discount
plans. This algorithm is recently used by e commerce websites
like Amazon.
2. Logistic regression [8]:
It is a powerful statistical way of modeling a binomial
outcome (takes the value 0 or 1 like having or not having a
disease) with one or more explanatory variables. It is used to

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predict whether a particular product will be sold or no in
future based on its previous sales.
3. Linear regression:
It implements a statistical model that, when relationships
between the independent variables and the dependent variable
are almost linear, shows optimal results. It is used for financial
forecasting, software cost prediction and software quality
assurance. One of the primary advantages of regression-based
techniques is that they use research and analysis to predict
what is likely to happen in the next quarter, year or even
farther into the future. Organizations restructure their budget
using logistic regression.
As shown in (Fig.1) The Sales Analytics tool is one which
takes input the sales transactions data by using data mining
techniques [4]. The raw data is then segmented as products
that are sold, the combination of products sold together,
product ratings [9] and product review [3]. These are then
profiled into graphs to obtain the market trends and patterns
from which we obtain the fast selling and slow selling
products. Then the tool decides which product’s price needs to
be increased and which products should be discounted or
discarded. Merchandize planning is updated accordingly to
balance the stocks so that there is no shortage of products. The
prices of products are revised according to their demand to
increase the profit of organizations.

4. Sales strategy [6] :

To expand the sales of e-commerce products in a competitive
market there is need to apply the following sales strategies:
1. Recommend Products and Up sells
2. Offer discounts and Flash sales
3. Add reviews and ratings
4. Increase Urgency
III. EXISTING SYSTEMS

Existing systems helps in classifying the various systems

which are already in the market. The classification of existing
systems is given as follows: Fig 1. Overview of the system.
Mindtree:
● It has a reporting capability which provides a
The block diagram (Fig.2) shows the working of every unit of
complete view of customers. the Sales Analytics Tool.
● It consists of a manager module which is used for
planning, preparing and tracking customer
interactions.
Micro Strategy
Ɣ To create superior data visualizations it uses a
powerful visual data exploration interface.
Ɣ The data from multiple sources is combined.
Ɣ Feasible advanced analytics are used for trend
analysis and financial analysis.
Tableau:
Ɣ It has an excellent user interface: It has highest
number of customers as it provides convenient,
straightforward and manageable user interface.
Ɣ Integration: It integrates well with big data platforms;
including Hadoop it also offers support for Google
BigQuery API– a boon for organizations that want
highly detailed analytics.

Drawbacks of Existing Systems:

● Since the system uses Big Data for analysis there are
many drawbacks in this system.
Ɣ Tools which use big data sets are imprecise.
Ɣ Data breach can occur due to big data analytics..
Ɣ Existing systems like MicroStrategy have a very
complex development environment. Despite of the
fact that it uses Schema & SQL Engine it has a very Fig 2. Block Diagram of Analysis and Optimization of Online Sales Of
high development speed. Products.

The features of Analysis and Optimization of Online Sales of

Products as follows:
IV. OUR APPROACH
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x Database: The database contains all details of the

products sold, product selling patterns, stocks of
products, prices of products, account details.
x Product Sold: Here we analyze the products which
are sold and those which are not sold.
x Product Rating and Reviews: The reviews from
customers who have made a purchase from the
organization helps to understand which products are
liked by them.
x Market Trends: Sales patterns of the product sold
indicate market trends, here we do the changes in
customer demands e.g. increasing or decreasing
product price also add new product or any service
launch for growing sales.
x Product Selling Patterns: According to the sales of
products, generate a pattern of sales which shows Fig 4.Women’s clothing
fast-selling and less-selling products.
x Sales Strategies: It will perform various sales 1. The home page of our website shows various categories of
strategies to optimize online sales like Recommend clothing like women’s clothing, men’s clothing, kid’s
Products and Up sells, special offers on products, clothing.
Increase Urgency, Add reviews and ratings. 2. One of the clothing webpage i.e women’s clothing is shown
x Current Stock: It will Check the product stock if in fig b.
product is out of stock then balance the stock and also 5.2 Back End
make offer discount on less-selling products.
The sales analytics tool works at the back end of an e-
x Current Prices: It will Evaluate and change the
commerce website.
product prices (increase/decrease) according to sales.
x Increased Sales: The overall aim of this system is to
increase productivity of products and increase the
overall sales profits.

V. IMPLEMENTATION

We have provided the screenshots of our website as well as

our Sales Analytics Tool that works as a back end of the
website to perform analysis and optimization of sales of
products.
5.1 Front End
Fig.5 Sales Transaction Data
In order to demonstrate the working of our Sales Analytics
Tool we created an e-commerce clothing website.

Fig. 6 Segmentation

1. The Sales Analytics Tool first performs analysis on

sales transaction data which has all the product
information and quantity of products that are
Fig. 3 Home Page sold.(Fig5.)
2. Based on the selling quantity the data is segmented as
fast selling and less selling products. (Fig 6.)
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Fig 9.Question on usability

Fig 7.Update Stocks

Fig 10.Question on evaluation

Analysis of usability: (Fig.9) Question asks the users to

compare our system with the existing systems on the basis of
ease in using the system and the features of our system on the
scale of 1-5. The above reviews show that the users of our
system feel our system is quite easy to be used and hence have
rated it 1 on 5 which shows that the level of difficulty in using
our system is almost negligible.

Analysis of Evaluation: (Fig.10) Question asks the users to

rate the effectiveness of our system and how it helps them to
Fig 8.Pricing Table effectively increase their sales. The responses given by the
users show that the effectiveness of the system is very good
3. After segmenting the data the Sales Analytics Tool works
and meets the user’s satisfaction.
on optimizing the sales. It checks the current stocks and
predicts the future stocks of the products. Using this the stocks
6.2 Optimizing sales and updating stocks
can be updated according to the demand of the products(Fig.7)
4. Lastly the Sales Analytics tool works on pricing the
products. It updates the prices of fast selling products and
offers discounts on the slow selling products in order to
increase profits of the organisation (Fig.8)

VI. TESTING

The “Sales Analytics Tool” has been evaluated with the intent
to find whether it has satisfied the specified requirements or
not.
The following graphs show the results of the testing conducted
with respect to our application and the existing systems. Fig.11 Question on optimizing sales
We used surveymonkey site [10] to conduct our survey and it
included the following questions:

6.1 Usability and Evaluation

Fig. 12 Question on updating stocks

Optimization of sales: (Fig.11) In this question we asked the

users whether Sales Analytics tool helps them in increasing
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the profits of their organisation by increasing the prices and [10] www.surveymonkey.com
offering discounts. The responses of the users show that Sales
Analytics tool effectively helps them to increase their sales
and profits.
Analysis on Updating Stocks: (Fig.12) in this question we
have asked the users whether our system helps them in
updating the stocks of the fast-selling products. The responses
of the users show that Sales analytics tool is very helpful in
updating the stocks according to the sales.

VII.CONCLUSION

Due to tremendous growth of online shopping it has become

increasingly necessary for organizations to utilize automated
tools to find the desired information resources, and to track
and analyze the sales transaction. Patterns of the type of
products that are sold frequently can be found out using data
mining of sales data.Thus by observing the vast increase in e-
commerce websites there was a need to make use of various
data mining algorithms to optimize the sales of our e-
commerce website. By performing analysis on database of the
products we will update the stocks of our inventory by using
algorithms like Market Basket Analysis. This algorithm helps
to produce patterns product sales. Then we will categorize the
products as fast-selling and less-selling products using
algorithms like logistic and linear regression. Accordingly we
will update stocks of fast-selling products.

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