Applications of Big Data Analytics in E-commerce Domain:

1. Social media analytics and E-commerce

2. Predictive Analytics
3. Mobile Analytics and E-commerce
4. Customer Segmentation
5. Predictive Analytics for Inventory management
6. Price Optimization
7. Fraud Detection and Prevention
8. Supply chain optimization

1>Social Media analytics and E-commerce:

Social media analytics in the E-commerce domain refers to the process of collecting,
analyzing, and interpreting data from various social media platforms to gain valuable
insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends related to online shopping.
These insights can then be used to make informed decisions, optimize marketing
strategies, and improve overall business performance
Techniques used: Text mining, Sentiment
Tools: Woopra, Hadoop, Apache Spark

2>Predictive Analytics:
Predictive analytics in E-commerce involves the use of historical data, statistical
algorithms, and machine learning techniques to forecast future trends, customer
behavior, and business outcomes. By analyzing past data, E-commerce businesses can
make data-driven predictions about customer preferences, product demand, inventory
needs, and marketing performance.
Usage: Product Recommendation, Price Management, Predictive Search
Techniques: Collobrative filtering , Clustering Algorithm

3>Mobile Analytics:
Mobile analytics in E-commerce refers to the process of collecting, analyzing, and
interpreting data related to user interactions and behavior on mobile devices (such as
smartphones and tablets) within the context of an E-commerce platform or mobile app.
Mobile analytics provides valuable insights into how customers engage with the E-
commerce platform on mobile devices, allowing businesses to optimize their mobile
strategies and improve the overall user experience.
Techniques: Geolocation Analytics
 Tools: Google Analytics for Mobile apps

4>Customer Segmentation:
Customer segmentation in the E-commerce domain refers to the process of categorizing
customers into distinct groups based on specific characteristics, behaviors, or
demographics. By dividing the customer base into segments, E-commerce businesses can
better understand their customers' needs, preferences, and purchasing patterns. This
knowledge allows companies to create targeted marketing strategies, personalized
offers, and tailored experiences, ultimately increasing customer satisfaction and
maximizing sales.

5> Predictive Analytics for Inventory management :

Predictive analytics for inventory management in the E-commerce domain involves using
historical data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning techniques to forecast future
demand and optimize inventory levels. By analyzing past sales patterns, customer behavior,
and market trends, businesses can make data-driven predictions to improve inventory
management processes and ensure adequate stock levels.

6>Price Optimization:
Price optimization in E-commerce refers to the process of determining the most effective
and competitive pricing strategy for products or services offered by an online retailer. The
goal of price optimization is to set prices that maximize revenue, profit margins, and market
competitiveness while taking into account various factors such as demand, competition,
customer behavior, and cost considerations.

7> Fraud Detection and Prevention:

Big data analytics for fraud detection and prevention in e-commerce is a powerful approach that
leverages large volumes of data to identify and mitigate fraudulent activities within online retail
platforms. With the rapid growth of e-commerce and the increasing sophistication of fraudulent
schemes, traditional rule-based systems are often inadequate in detecting complex fraud patterns.
Big data analytics offers a more comprehensive and adaptive solution by processing massive datasets
in real-time or near-real-time.

8>Supply chain management:

Big data analytics has become increasingly important in supply chain management for e-commerce
companies. The vast amount of data generated in the e-commerce industry, including customer
orders, inventory levels, logistics information, and market trends, can be leveraged through big data
analytics to optimize and enhance various aspects of the supply chain. Big data analytics in supply
chain management for e-commerce is about using data-driven insights to optimize various aspects of
the supply chain. From demand forecasting and inventory management to logistics optimization and
customer experience, big data analytics empowers e-commerce businesses to make informed
decisions and stay competitive in a dynamic market.
Techniques for Big data analytics in e-commerce:-
Recommendation Systems:
Recommendation systems leverage machine learning algorithms to provide
personalized product suggestions to customers based on their past
interactions, browsing behavior, and similar user patterns. Collaborative
filtering and content-based filtering are common techniques used in
recommendation systems to enhance customer engagement and boost sales.

Sentiment Analysis:
Sentiment analysis, a subset of Natural Language Processing (NLP), is used to
analyze customer feedback, product reviews, and social media interactions to
gauge customer sentiments towards products and the brand. This technique
helps businesses understand customer perceptions, identify areas of
improvement, and respond to customer concerns promptly.

Demand Forecasting:
Demand forecasting involves using historical data and external factors like
seasonality, promotions, and market trends to predict future customer
demand. Accurate demand forecasting enables E-Commerce businesses to
optimize inventory management, reduce stockouts, and meet customer
expectations efficiently.

Shopping Cart Analysis:

Shopping cart analysis involves analyzing customer behavior during the
shopping journey, specifically studying the items added to the cart and the
subsequent actions taken. This technique helps businesses understand reasons
for cart abandonment and implement strategies to recover lost sales.

A/B Testing:
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a technique used to compare two or
more versions of a web page or product to determine which performs better in
terms of customer engagement and conversions. E-Commerce businesses can
use A/B testing to optimize website design, product pages, and marketing
campaigns.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Analysis:

CLV analysis involves estimating the potential value a customer brings to the
business throughout their relationship. By calculating CLV, E-Commerce
companies can identify their most valuable customers, prioritize customer
retention efforts, and tailor loyalty programs to maximize long-term
profitability.

Price Optimization:
Price optimization techniques use historical sales data, competitor pricing, and
market trends to determine the most optimal pricing strategy for products. By
dynamically adjusting prices, businesses can attract customers and maximize
revenue while remaining competitive in the market.

Market Basket Analysis:

Market basket analysis involves identifying associations and relationships
between products frequently purchased together. This technique helps
businesses create product bundles, cross-sell opportunities, and personalized
promotions based on customer purchasing patterns.

Real-Time Analytics:
Real-time analytics involves processing and analyzing data as it is generated to
enable immediate responses to customer behavior. E-Commerce companies
use real-time analytics to provide instant product recommendations,
personalized offers, and responsive customer support.
Analytical Tools used in big-data analysis in e-commerce:

Apache Hadoop:
Apache Hadoop is an open-source distributed computing framework that facilitates the
storage and processing of massive datasets across clusters of computers. It consists of
Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) for distributed storage and MapReduce for parallel
data processing. E-Commerce businesses use Hadoop to handle large volumes of data
efficiently and perform tasks like customer segmentation and demand forecasting.

Apache Spark:
Apache Spark is another open-source Big Data processing engine that offers in-memory data
processing capabilities, significantly enhancing the speed of analytics. Spark provides
libraries for various data analysis tasks, including machine learning and graph processing. E-
Commerce companies use Spark for real-time data processing, recommendation systems,
and personalization.

Apache Kafka:
Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform used to handle real-time data feeds and
event streaming. E-Commerce businesses utilize Kafka to capture and analyze customer
interactions and respond promptly to customer behavior. It is often employed for real-time
analytics and building responsive systems in the E-Commerce domain.

Elasticsearch:
Elasticsearch is an open-source search and analytics engine that allows businesses to search,
analyze, and visualize large volumes of data in real-time. E-Commerce platforms use
Elasticsearch to provide efficient and accurate search results, enabling customers to find
products quickly and easily.

Tableau:
Tableau is a powerful data visualization tool that enables businesses to create interactive
and visually appealing dashboards to explore and present data. E-Commerce companies use
Tableau to visualize customer behavior, sales performance, and marketing effectiveness,
helping them gain insights and make informed decisions.
TensorFlow:
TensorFlow is an open-source machine learning framework developed by Google, widely
used for building and deploying machine learning models. E-Commerce businesses leverage
TensorFlow for tasks such as recommendation systems, product categorization, and demand
forecasting.

Visualization Tools:
Tableau:
Tableau is a powerful and widely-used data visualization tool that allows users
to create interactive and visually appealing dashboards. E-Commerce
businesses can leverage Tableau to analyze sales trends, customer behavior,
and marketing performance. With its user-friendly interface and extensive
visualization options, Tableau enables faster decision-making and facilitates the
communication of insights across teams.

Power BI:
Microsoft Power BI is another widely used data visualization tool that provides
advanced analytics capabilities for E-Commerce businesses. It integrates
seamlessly with various data sources, allowing users to create dynamic reports
and interactive dashboards. Power BI’s integration with Microsoft Excel and
other Microsoft products makes it a popular choice for organizations already
using Microsoft’s ecosystem.

Google Data Studio:

Google Data Studio is a free and user-friendly data visualization tool that
integrates with various data sources, including Google Analytics and Google
Ads. E-Commerce businesses can create customizable reports and dashboards
to monitor website performance, customer engagement, and marketing
campaign effectiveness.

QlikView:
QlikView is a data discovery and visualization tool that enables businesses to
explore and analyze large datasets easily. With its associative data model,
QlikView allows users to interactively navigate data and uncover hidden
insights. E-Commerce companies can use QlikView to gain a deeper
understanding of customer behavior, product performance, and sales trends.

Domo:
Domo is a cloud-based business intelligence platform that offers robust data
visualization and analytics capabilities. E-Commerce businesses can use Domo
to create real-time dashboards, track key performance indicators (KPIs), and
collaborate across departments to make data-driven decisions.

TYPES AND SOURCES OF DATA:

Predictive analytics in e-commerce using big data analytics relies on a variety of
data sources to gather relevant information and make accurate predictions.
Here are some key data sources commonly used for predictive analytics in the
e-commerce domain:

Customer Data: This includes customer profiles, purchase history, browsing

behavior, demographics, and other relevant information that helps understand
customer preferences and predict their future buying patterns.

Transactional Data: Data about past transactions, including purchase details,

product IDs, timestamps, payment methods, and order values, can be used to
analyze historical trends and forecast future sales.

Website Analytics: Web analytics data from tools like Google Analytics provides
insights into website traffic, user behavior, clickstream data, conversion rates,
and bounce rates, helping to optimize the user experience and predict
conversion rates.
Product Data: Information about products, including product attributes,
categories, inventory levels, pricing, and sales history, is crucial for
understanding which products are popular and predicting demand.

Social Media Data: Social media platforms generate vast amounts of data that
can be mined for sentiment analysis, customer feedback, and brand
perception, which can influence predictive models.

External Data: Data from external sources, such as economic indicators,

weather data, and events calendars, can be integrated into predictive models
to account for external factors that might impact e-commerce sales.

Customer Feedback and Reviews: Analyzing customer reviews and feedback

provides valuable insights into product satisfaction, potential issues, and areas
for improvement, which can guide future predictions.

Competitor Data: Monitoring and analyzing competitor data can help identify
market trends, pricing strategies, and potential opportunities or threats in the
e-commerce landscape.

Mobile App Data: For mobile commerce, data from mobile apps can provide
insights into user behavior, app performance, and engagement, leading to
better predictions for mobile users.

CRM and Email Marketing Data: Customer relationship management (CRM)

data and email marketing data offer insights into customer interactions,
communication history, and engagement levels, contributing to personalized
predictive models.
Search Data: Analyzing on-site search queries and results can offer valuable
insights into customer intent, preferences, and popular products.

Location Data: Geospatial data can be used to identify regional trends, target
specific locations, and optimize logistics and delivery processes.

Analytics algorithms:
Linear Regression: This algorithm is used for predicting numerical values, such
as sales volume or revenue, based on historical data and relevant features like
time, product attributes, and marketing spend.

Logistic Regression: Logistic regression is used when the outcome to be

predicted is binary, such as predicting whether a customer will make a
purchase or not, based on historical data and customer attributes.

Decision Trees: Decision trees are versatile and easy-to-understand algorithms

that can be used for both classification and regression tasks. They partition the
data into hierarchical structures to make predictions based on a series of if-
then-else conditions.

Random Forest: Random Forest is an ensemble method that combines multiple

decision trees to improve predictive accuracy and reduce overfitting. It is
commonly used for classification tasks in e-commerce, such as customer
segmentation and product recommendations.

Gradient Boosting Machines (GBM): GBM is another ensemble method that

builds multiple weak learners sequentially, with each new model trying to
correct the errors of the previous ones. It is widely used for classification and
regression tasks in e-commerce due to its high accuracy.
Support Vector Machines (SVM): SVM is a powerful algorithm used for
classification tasks. It works by finding the hyperplane that best separates the
data points of different classes in a high-dimensional space.

Neural Networks: Deep learning neural networks have shown great success in
various predictive tasks within e-commerce, such as image recognition for
product categorization or natural language processing for sentiment analysis.

Collaborative Filtering: Collaborative filtering is a recommendation system

technique that predicts a user's interests based on the preferences of similar
users. It is commonly used for personalized product recommendations in e-
commerce.

Association Rule Mining: Association rule mining is used to discover

relationships between products based on transaction data, allowing retailers to
identify product co-occurrences and design effective cross-selling strategies.

Time Series Forecasting: Time series forecasting algorithms like ARIMA

(AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average) and Prophet are used to predict
future sales or demand based on historical time-series data.

Clustering Algorithms: Clustering algorithms like k-means are used for customer
segmentation, grouping similar customers together based on their behavior
and preferences.

Matrix Factorization: Matrix factorization is used in collaborative filtering and

recommendation systems to factorize user-item interaction matrices and make
personalized recommendations.
Visualization Algorithms:
Scatter Plots: Scatter plots are used to visualize the relationship between two
numerical variables. In e-commerce, they can be used to plot customer
purchase behavior, such as the relationship between purchase frequency and
order value.

Line Charts: Line charts are useful for visualizing time-series data, showing
trends and fluctuations over time. They are commonly used to display sales
trends, website traffic, or customer engagement metrics over time.

Bar Charts: Bar charts are suitable for visualizing categorical data, such as
product categories, customer segments, or sales by region. They are effective
for comparisons and identifying top-performing categories or regions.

Heatmaps: Heatmaps are excellent for displaying matrices of data, such as

customer-product interactions. They use color intensity to represent the
magnitude of values, making it easy to identify patterns and correlations.

Bubble Charts: Bubble charts can be used to visualize three variables

simultaneously. For instance, the position of a bubble can represent customer
spend, the size of the bubble can represent purchase frequency, and the color
can represent customer segmentation