This post is about retail analytics – the kind that is all about identifying and analyzing retail offerings based on data collected from in-store sales, online shopping, and other online interactions.
Retail analytics is a very exciting field to work in because it takes a lot of data that is collected in the course of your job and uses it to help you make better (or worse) decisions. It’s also a very competitive field with a lot of startups trying to leverage their data in a way to boost their own business.
In this case, we’re talking about analyzing a bunch of data from retailers that sell in-house to get a better picture of how their brands and stores perform. For example, if you run a department store that has a particular specialty, such as in-house cosmetics, you might want to know how well your stores perform in relation to the competition.
Retailer data is a tricky one because it’s all too easy to get your data wrong. For example, if you have a clothing line that has a particular pattern or is popular among certain age demographics, you might not know whether you are doing well, but you might be doing worse, so you might want to look at competitor data in this case.
Our industry data is gathered from a variety of sources, including the National Retail Federation and the U.S. Census Bureau, and we use it to analyze our own performance as well as that of other retail businesses. To give you an example, we took the top 30 stores in our industry and looked at how well they were doing compared to their industry peers. We also looked at the sales of their competitors.
We’re not sure what the answer is for your specific market, but if it’s anything like ours, we’d be looking at the sales data of the top 10 or 20 of your competitors.
We have to think about what we’re doing in a world where Google is going to have a lot more information about us than we do. I do realize that the data we have on our own sites is a little different than what others have. But we use it to figure out what our industry peers are doing. I guess the bottom line is that Google may be getting better at determining if we’re doing something right and if so, where.
Google, in particular, is getting better and better at analyzing the shopping behavior of other retailers. What they are doing is building an understanding of our behaviors and buying habits that allows them to better serve us in the search results. It’s an interesting idea.
One of the things I’ve read here and on other blogs is that Google is doing something called a “retail assortment.” Basically, they are using Google Analytics data to figure out what other retailers are doing with the same items in their stores. You can read more about assortment here.
Retail Sampling is a pretty cool idea. But its pretty important to remember what it is that you are doing. As an example, the other retailers who are doing assortment may have the same product, but they may have different inventory. This is because they may have a different shopping cart and different order settings. They may also have different shipping options. The result is that other retailers may be seeing a different assortment of the same items in their stores.