How do e-commerce companies make good use of big data

How do e-commerce companies make good use of big data

Big data is promoting the birth of a new blue ocean and new economic growth points, and is becoming a new focus of competition between the government and enterprises. In 20 12, Davos Forum released the report "Big Data, Great Impact", saying that "data has become a new economic asset category, just like money or gold". In 20 12, the us government launched the "big data research and development plan" to raise big data to the national strategic level. For enterprises, data is replacing talents as the core competitiveness of enterprises.

In many fields, it is obvious that e-commerce enterprises will have more advantages than traditional retail enterprises in this respect, because e-commerce enterprises themselves provide retail services to users through data platforms. So, how do e-commerce companies apply this advantage?

E-commerce companies have inherent advantages.

At present, e-commerce in China is in a period of rapid development. Take Alibaba as an example. In 20 12, the total turnover of Taobao and tmall exceeded one trillion yuan. According to the data of the National Bureau of Statistics, the total retail sales of social consumer goods in 20 12 years was 20. 17 trillion yuan, and 1 trillion yuan was equivalent to 4.8% of the total. Behind the explosive development of e-commerce in China is the geometric growth of consumer data, and leading e-commerce companies are also actively deploying, exploring and excavating big data-related applications.

-E-commerce companies innovate business models through big data applications.

The important trend of big data is the transformation of data services, which divides people into many groups and provides targeted services to each group and even everyone. The increase of consumption data provides e-commerce enterprises with the basis for accurately grasping the network behavior patterns of user groups and individuals. Through the application of big data, e-commerce companies can explore personalized, personalized, accurate and intelligent advertising push and promotion services, and create a new business model that is more cost-effective than existing advertising and product promotion forms. At the same time, e-commerce companies can also find more and better ways to increase user stickiness, develop new products and services and reduce operating costs by grasping big data.

In fact, foreign traditional retail giants have already started the application and practice of big data. Tesco is the second largest profitable retailer in the world. It fully understands the user's behavior from the purchase record of membership card, and carries out a series of business activities on this basis. For example, the promotion sent to users by mail or letter can become more personalized, and the goods and promotions of merchants in the store can also be more targeted according to the preferences and consumption time of the surrounding people, thus improving the circulation of goods. This method has brought rich returns to Tesco, and promoting only one product in the market can help it save 350 million pounds a year.

Domestically, e-commerce enterprises in China have gradually realized the importance of big data application for e-commerce development. Taking Vanke Eslite as an example, after the rapid development in recent years, the annual sales volume of Vanke has doubled, and the inventory problem has gradually become the main factor restricting its development. On 20 1 1 year, Vanke set up a data center to study and analyze the relationship between new products being put on the shelves and the growth of new users, and the relationship between each new product being put on the line and the second purchase that users can bring, so as to carry out big data application practice. At present, Vanke's high inventory problem has been alleviated, and the inventory turnover cycle has been reduced from 100 days to 50 ~30 days, effectively reducing operating costs.

-E-commerce companies promote differentiated competition through big data applications.

At present, two prominent problems in the development of e-commerce in China are cost and homogeneous competition. The arrival of the era of big data will provide new ways for its development and competition, including specific products and service forms, and enhance the competitiveness of enterprises through personalized innovation.

By integrating the resources of its business platforms such as Taobao, Tmall, Alibaba Cloud, Alipay and Wang Wan, Alibaba has formed a strong e-commerce customer base and the whole industry chain information of consumer behavior, and created a unique data processing capability that other e-commerce companies can't imitate and emulate at present. At the same time, it also promoted the competition of e-commerce from a simple price war to a higher level, forming differentiated competition. At present, Taobao has formed more than 100 data platform products, including data cube, quantum constant channel, super analysis, gold medal statistics, cloud mirror data and so on. Its functions include store basic operation analysis, commodity analysis, marketing effect analysis, buyer analysis, order analysis, supply chain analysis, industry analysis, financial analysis and forecast analysis.

In addition, e-commerce companies actively explore and develop a new blue ocean-Internet finance business through big data applications. At present, three major e-commerce companies, Ali, JD.COM and Suning, have successively tested the water. In addition to the success of "Ali Small Loan" model, "JD.COM. COM mode is gradually showing results. 20 12, JD.COM and Bank of China jointly launched "Supply Chain Financial Services". Suppliers apply for financing from JD.COM according to their orders and receipt documents in JD.COM, which are approved and submitted to the bank for loan application. This service can help JD.COM suppliers greatly shorten the settlement cycle, and the return on capital will increase from about 60% to 226%.

Be wary of privacy risks

Although e-commerce companies have been at the forefront of the era of big data, while planning a beautiful blueprint for big data, they should also be alert to the challenges and risks they face.

Enterprise information investment will develop on a large scale. Business transaction information within e-commerce enterprises, including commodity and logistics information, as well as users' social information and location information, will constitute the main source of enterprise big data. Its information content far exceeds the carrying capacity of the existing enterprise IT architecture and infrastructure, and its real-time requirements far exceed the existing computing capacity. In addition, e-commerce companies will also face data governance issues, such as data islands, data quality and data patterns. In order to benefit from big data, e-commerce enterprises in China are bound to make a new round of information investment and construction.

The relevant management policies are still unclear. In the era of big data, cloud computing will inevitably become the business model chosen by e-commerce companies, and its essence is data processing technology. Data is an asset, and the cloud provides a place and channel for the preservation and access of data assets. The services provided by cloud computing include not only software services, application platform services, but also infrastructure services. However, the management policies and technical standards for cloud computing services in China are still unclear.

Data security and privacy issues are prominent. On the one hand, a large number of data collection, including a large number of enterprise operation data, customer information, personal privacy and detailed records of various behaviors, will face an increased risk of data leakage. E-commerce companies should not only prevent data from being lost on the cloud, but also prevent data from being stolen and tampered with at the end. On the other hand, the ownership and use rights of some sensitive data have not been clearly defined, and many analyses based on big data have not taken into account the personal privacy issues involved.