How Can eCommerce Businesses Gain From Big Data?

An amazing feature about being a writer on eCommerce is that one has to constantly keep on top of the latest concepts and technologies. On more than one occasion, this has led to me following the herd and falling for the hype. I wonder if that can possibly forgive the fact that I have thus far overlooked writing about the application of big data to eCommerce. It is time for me to right this wrong.

What Is Big Data?

A textbook definition would be much more rigorous, but think of big data this way: every time a user interacts with your website, you collect data. This data could be the kind that is entered in a form or created in the background. Some background data on an eCommerce website could be:

  • The clickstream
  • The path to purchase
  • The referring website or search engine
  • The time spent on various locations of your eCommerce website
  • The products viewed, but not purchased
  • The website bells and whistles availed of, e.g. image enlargement, image rotation, price comparison, packaging options, add-ons, and the like.
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But big data is not restricted to the data that is captured by the forms and logs on your website. It also incorporates relevant user activity on their websites as well as on third-party websites, such as social media platforms. Some examples of such data could be likes, comments, tweets, and uploaded images on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Quora, LinkedIn, and other platforms that are relevant to your brand, websites, and offerings.

How Can eCommerce Businesses Use Big Data?

Extracting Superior Information From Data

If this were a Calvin and Hobbes book, I would have titled it There's Data Everywhere(with due apologies to Bill Waterson's book, There's Treasure Everywhere). But the fact is that there is so much data out there that present methods of analysis seem inadequate to derive valuable and actionable information from them. But if an eCommerce professional has a strong conceptual understanding of big data then it is possible to use analytics to unearth gems of information where none were obvious.

Making Pricing, Promotions, Placement, and Other Important Decisions

Instead of pulling critical numbers from thin air, wouldn't it be great to be able to base important management decisions on actual information? This too is something that big data can help with.

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Overcoming the Scourge of Impersonal eCommerce

There are several disadvantages of eCommerce, but in my mind, the greatest disadvantage is that it de-personalizes the shopping experience. The communication on an eCommerce website is generic, if not cookie-cutter. But if you are able to analyze data effectively, you can create a unique buying experience for each visitor. And I do not only mean stuff like, "People who bought this also bought..."

And Much More...

Frankly, the use of big data is only limited by your imagination. If proper analytical tools are used, many high-level decisions that usually span multiple management meetings can actually be automated. I would like to draw a parallel to program trading on stock exchanges. What program trading does is monitor price and volume movements and automatically initiate trading positions. If that can be done (and has been done for decades), imagine the actionable business intelligence that can result from eCommerce big data.

Integrating Data From All Streams and Unearthing Correlations

Modern processes for collecting and analyzing big data can actually pull together data from multiple sources and come up with correlations.

Make Sure to Avoid Reaching the Wrong Conclusions

It is important to avoid making gross generalizations when analyzing big data or, for that matter, drawing erroneous conclusions. One common error is assuming causality between two types of customer behaviors, where actually they are just co-occurring and do not have a cause-effect relationship.

View live interactive examples in InetSoft's dashboard and visualization gallery.

Privacy Issues in Accessing and Processing Big Data

As you get deeper and deeper into mining data, you are likely to hit a roadblock in terms of privacy rights. In fact, there might be statutory limitations to the kind of data you can access or, more importantly, share.

More InetSoft Articles About Big Data

Deep Insights Into Consumer Behavior

This article explains how big data techniques can reveal the customer interactions that happen before a transaction occurs. It focuses on marketing attribution, clickstream analysis, and the use of MapReduce-style processing to move beyond last-click measurement. The discussion ties those methods to digital marketing optimization and cross-channel behavior analysis. It also extends the argument into industries such as telecommunications, where massive event streams create new opportunities for analysis. The main takeaway is that accessible analytics tools now make customer-centric big data strategies practical for business teams.

Questions That Really Count

This piece distinguishes business analytics from traditional business intelligence by emphasizing prediction, optimization, and forward-looking analysis. It argues that organizations get the most value when they frame analytics around concrete business questions instead of trying to analyze everything at once. The article also shows how industries like healthcare, education, and manufacturing are using larger data volumes to improve decisions. A later section lays out a stepwise approach covering objectives, data preparation, analysis, insight sharing, and action. Overall, it presents big data exploration as a disciplined process for building an analytics culture rather than a purely technical exercise.

Easy-To-Use Drag-And-Drop Designer

This page presents InetSoft's approach to dashboard reporting for Apache Spark environments. It emphasizes browser-based dashboards, interactive examples, and a design workflow built around drag-and-drop authoring. The positioning is aimed at teams that want to expose Spark-backed data to business users without forcing them into engineering-heavy tools. The page also ties Spark reporting to broader self-service BI, reporting, and dashboard capabilities in the platform. In practice, it frames Spark as a scalable data layer that can be surfaced through accessible reporting interfaces.

Great-Looking Web-Based Dashboards Visualizations

This article is focused on Hadoop-oriented reporting and visualization rather than Hadoop as storage alone. It promotes a web-based dashboard layer that can sit on top of Hadoop data and expose it through visual, interactive reports. The surrounding resources reinforce the idea that big data projects need analysis, mashup, and dashboard capabilities in addition to raw cluster infrastructure. Several linked examples expand on native execution, integration with multiple data sources, and Hadoop-centric analytics patterns. The overall message is that Hadoop becomes more useful when business users can explore it visually instead of relying only on backend processing frameworks.

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Connect It To R ML Models

This page focuses on using dashboards to display outputs from data science and machine learning workflows. It highlights the ability to connect to big data sources and visualize model behavior dynamically as feature inputs change. That makes it relevant to teams that want to operationalize models instead of leaving them isolated in notebook environments. The page also positions dashboarding as a bridge between technical model builders and decision makers who need interpretable results. In that sense, it treats big data as valuable only when advanced models can be turned into usable business views.

Analytics For ML Models Built In Spark

This article centers on reporting and visualization for machine learning models that run in Spark environments. It suggests that big data analytics should not stop at model training but should extend into explainable reporting and interactive consumption. The examples and related links connect Spark-based ML work to visualization, query tooling, and broader data science workflows. That gives the page a practical slant for organizations that need to surface model outputs to non-technical users. Its core value proposition is a reporting layer that makes Spark-scale analytics easier to communicate and act on.

Data Already Residing In The Cluster

This article describes InetSoft's native integration strategy for Spark instead of a thin JDBC or ODBC connection model. The main idea is that analytic processing should run inside the cluster so large datasets do not have to be moved out before work begins. It covers query acceleration, pushdown logic, materialized data handling, and the role of specialized storage for interactive analysis. The page also connects Spark integration to machine learning and streaming so the BI layer can take advantage of more than just batch computation. The result is a big data architecture designed to preserve scale and performance while still supporting self-service analytics.

Machine Learning Real-Time Streaming And Graphical Analysis

This piece argues that Hadoop and Spark should be treated as a full operating system for big data workloads, not merely as storage engines. It explains that the real advantage comes when analytics, visualization, dashboards, and reporting execute natively inside that environment. The page also discusses a staged adoption path, including a packaged "Big-Data-In-A-Box" deployment for organizations that lack specialized cluster skills. Additional case study material expands the concept into manufacturing, supply chain, R&D, and financial analytics use cases. Its central point is that native execution unlocks more of the platform's value across analytics and operational decision making.

“We evaluated many reporting vendors and were most impressed at the speed with which the proof of concept could be developed. We found InetSoft to be the best option to meet our business requirements and integrate with our own technology.”
- John White, Senior Director, Information Technology at Livingston International

All Within An Intuitively Easy Interface

This article compares

#1 Ranking: Read how InetSoft was rated #1 for user adoption in G2's user survey-based index.
major big data infrastructure providers while positioning InetSoft as the analytics layer that can work across them. It highlights compatibility with open-source standards, support for large datasets, and the role of data mashup, reports, and interactive dashboards. The vendor overview spans platforms such as AWS, Cloudera, Google, MemSQL, and MongoDB, giving the page a market-comparison angle. A longer scenario then demonstrates how heterogeneous, high-volume data can be explored visually in an advanced research setting. The page is useful for readers who need both vendor context and a clear explanation of where the analytics layer fits in a big data stack.

Built-In Dedicated Spark/Hadoop Cluster

This page is about simplifying big data adoption for organizations that do not want to assemble multiple tools on their own. It positions InetSoft as a unified platform that can connect to existing data sources or provide its own Spark and Hadoop cluster path. The article emphasizes on-the-fly transformation, dashboarding, reporting, and self-service analytics as part of one environment. It also argues that companies can grow into larger data volumes without replacing their analytics layer later. The overall framing is that big data should have a practical adoption path rather than a steep integration burden.

Open Source Distributed File System

This article takes a balanced view of Hadoop's long-term role in big data analysis. It acknowledges Hadoop's importance for cheap, scalable storage and for handling large, varied datasets without extensive modeling. At the same time, it argues that Hadoop should not be treated as the only data source because real analytics still requires blending multiple systems together. The discussion also touches on self-service BI and the different ways people consume analytics on desktop and mobile. As a result, the page is more strategic than promotional, focusing on where Hadoop fits in a broader analytics architecture.

Self-Service For The Mildly Technical

This page focuses on the organizational bottlenecks that appear when big data systems are hard to access quickly. It argues that Hadoop and related technologies solve scale problems, but that data federation and mashup are what make those systems useful to fast-moving business teams. A large portion of the article explains how self-service BI and agile BI benefit from federated access to multiple data sources. It also covers governance, security, and the need to reduce IT dependency when users need new reports or prototypes. The big-data angle here is that scalable infrastructure only delivers value when paired with flexible, business-friendly access patterns.

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