BI Tools to Aid Your Business The business intelligence tools you need for your ecommerce business What is Business Intelligence? Business Intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term for software that collects, analyzes, and presents big data and data about your business. There are a number of different programs and software under the sphere of business intelligence that can help you take raw data, extract the pertinent pieces, and show you the information that matters for your business. BI can aid your marketing, sales, and customer service teams, just to name a few. By implementing and using BI software, it can lead to more informed decisions, better marketing, happier customers, and more sales. Data Mining and Warehousing ECommerce business intelligence tools that organize and analyze your data are data mining and warehousing software. Data warehousing software collects and organizes data from multiple sources and makes it easily available in one database. The data mining software then analyzes the data to find patterns that are present in the data. Data mining and warehousing software helps you make sense of information that might have otherwise been overlooked. The patterns found can lead you to conclusions that are invaluable to your company's employees when making important decisions. Reporting Software and Dashboards Reporting software is a BI tool that produces reports about the data being analyzed. The software allows you to personalize reports to the specifications that make it easiest for you to present data in the way that you want. It can also generate interactive reports that help you to further explore the information and the data behind it. Dashboards are another BI tool that displays information about data that has been examined. Dashboards, such as Clarity’s, are built into the software or platform, and display current key performance indicators (KPIs) and more in-depth analytics. Reporting software and dashboards give you greater insight that can help you make informed decisions faster. OLAP Online analytics processing (OLAP) is a business intelligence tool that allows you to pick and choose certain data and view it from different angles. If you have a wide selection of data, you can choose to just view and analyze a certain section. For example, instead of looking at a year’s worth of online customer behavior at your ecommerce website, you could just select December’s online customer behavior data. ecommerce Applications of Business Intelligence Tools All of these Business Intelligence tools have specific applications in ecommerce. A few examples include: Gaining a better understanding of buying patterns among different segments of customers. Creating data-driven promotions that are targeted based on customer behavior. Tracking the sales and margin performance of different products, allowing inventory and marketing to focus on higher-value items. Targeting marketing and relationship management to the most valuable customers. All-in-One BI Software Business intelligence for eCommerce tools is available through software or a software suite. Microsoft Business Intelligence and Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite are just a few examples of suites that offer all of the BI tools listed and more. Using a suite of software is usually the best option because it allows for the data to be easily shared between the tools without having to be transferred from one program to another. Clarity Can Help At Clarity, we understand how important it is for our clients to have the right information to make the best decisions for their businesses, which is why we stay up-to-date on the latest BI software. Our team at Clarity has extensive experience implementing business intelligence for our clients. To find out more about how we can help you have the information that you need, call or click to contact us today!