Welcome to Data eCommerce: A Game Changer For Black Friday

November has always been a massive month for eCommerce-oriented businesses. Black Friday is an extremely important date for eCommerce businesses ranging from sole dropshippers to big enterprises like Amazon and Apple. 

With dozens of discounts, offers, and incredible deals, there must be a catch or some sort of ROI-oriented strategy from these companies, right? 

There is, indeed. Let's analyse the usage of data for eCommerce and let's try to outline why it could be a game-changer for Black Friday. 

What Is Big Data? 

In order to properly analyse the phenomenon which applies data to eCommerce platforms, we should first and foremost describe, in simple terms, what big data is, given the fact that it is the foundation that will let us understand the power of certain marketing strategies. With big data, we intend a numerical value which associates an action, a keyword, a range of preferences to a specific, single user. 

This numerical value is then generally processed via a tool coded (generally) in Python, a programming language that is known for Machine Learning and automation-related features. This relatively complex process is set into place to gather data that will help marketing experts (especially within the digital field) in targeting audiences far more precisely. 

How Does This Apply To eCommerce? 

The usage of big data and terms like machine learning could seem a bit too distant from the eCommerce world, but the two are colliding now more than ever. As mentioned above, big data and data points could associate preferences and keywords to specific users, something which, if properly analysed, could help massively when planning ads and even content strategies. 

For example: if 45% of the data points collected are pointing out that a specific audience is only buying that specific product, the marketing team (or the sole person responsible for it) could save a substantial amount of money, by removing the remaining 55% of their audience from retargeting ads. This is just an example, but there are dozens (if not hundreds) of applications for which big data is being deployed within a marketing context. 

Black Friday: How Can Companies Use This For Their Digital Marketing? 

In order to understand the power of data for any Black Friday-related campaign, let's just imagine how many people Google/type on Amazon "Black Friday deals". Big spoiler ahead: there are no items optimised for such keyword, but yet again the internal clock of both Google and Amazon associates heavily discounted products with this keyword. 

How can this happen? Data. 

With this in mind, imagine being able to access such a database: you could be able to check your competitors' rankings, their descriptions and more. This is indeed possible, given the fact that, after GDPR, the usage of data points (prior to the user's agreement) must be published by the company/portal which is gathering such data. With such a big database and with a relatively simple knowledge of Python for data science, anyone will be able to strategise and put a solid marketing campaign into place. 

To Conclude 

Big data is, of course, much more than numerical values being processed for marketing purposes but, given the fact that it is fully usable by data scientists and other marketing-driven professionals, there's no harm in investing some resources into this very matter. Keeping this in mind could save you thousands in ads spending and will highly increase your ROI if done properly. 

Authors Bio:

Paul Matthews is a Manchester-based business and tech writer who writes in order to better inform business owners on how to run a successful business. He's currently consulting the biggest team of app developers in Manchester. You can usually find him at the local library or browsing Forbe's latest pieces.