It doesn’t matter if you are a brick-and-mortar retailer planning to move your business online or someone who has stayed in the game for decades now. Today, you are a part of one of the most competitive and fast-growing industries in the world. Research shows that the ecommerce market will reach $16.2 billion by 2027.
Having an online presence does not come without challenges. There are issues like low conversion rates, dissatisfied customers, difficulty attracting new customers, and more. These issues can affect your revenue, lead to financial losses, and even damage your reputation.
With a new retailer making a switch to online every second, your customers have plenty of options when it comes to online shopping.
Challenges faced by online retailers
The online retail market is a competitive industry. You need to work past these roadblocks to reach and retain customers. Let’s look at the challenges you should be aware of to flourish your online retail business.
Increased customer expectations
Customers have high expectations from the time they land on your online store to the moment they receive and unbox products. They want to have an impeccable shopping experience. But that isn’t all. Your customers also expect quality, affordability, and creativity. And if you cannot offer them these, you will lose out. One of the ways to ensure your business thrives is to keep your customers happy and satisfied.
Ever-increasing competition
The growing competition is one of the biggest challenges for retailers since the market continues to get more cramped. It would help if you learned what your competitors are doing differently to attract customers and retain them.
Many factors make your rivals a better option, including services and products offered, exceptional customer service, store presence on multiple platforms, better deals and offers, loyalty programs, etc. If you can get your hands on such vital information, you can stay relevant and bring in more customers in this competitive landscape.
Rapid market movements
We live in a world of uncertainty. But, in most situations, data can help you anticipate what lies ahead, what to expect, how to mitigate business risks, evolve with emerging trends, and much more. Suppose you can spot the changing market trends. In that case, you will be able to take appropriate and immediate action, which could help you stay relevant and outperform your competitors.
So, how do you stop these challenges from holding your business back? All you need is information on your competitors, customers, and the overall market. That’s where market intelligence comes in.
Getting acquainted with market intelligence
Market intelligence is the exercise of collecting and analyzing data to fuel business decisions. It enables you to become more customer-centric, understand market demands better, gather real-time and accurate data, avoid market risks, skyrocket your market share, and the possibilities are endless.
Market intelligence helps differentiate your products or brand from your competitors and proves helpful in providing critical information that can keep your company at the top of the game. Let’s see how retail market intelligence can help you address the challenges mentioned above.
Customer loyalty
Your customers are constantly looking for better products and services while your competitors monitor and target the customers. If you can figure out why your customers are dissatisfied and determine the reasons behind it, you can avoid loss of sales.
To get a holistic view of customer behavior and perceptions, you need to unify data from both your internal database and online sources. That’s where market intelligence proves helpful. You can track what your customers say about your store, the products you sell, and the customer service you offer.
Additionally, you can identify customers to adjust your communication and nurture customer relationships to improve loyalty rates.
Competitive advantage
As an online retailer, you should know how competitive your business is and at what pace the competition is growing. Here, business market intelligence helps you get your hands on vital information on your competitors in the marketplace. You can analyze how your competitors are entering the market and what they are doing right to sustain in the market.
Through competitive market analysis, you can gather information on product assortment to optimize your offerings and enhance the selection of products you make available to your customers.
For example, you can benchmark your most essential categories against the product categories offered by your key competitors. Know the distribution of your competitors’ assortment and the price ranges they fall in, the brands they sell, assortment trends, newly introduced or removed products, etc.
Detailed view of the market
You can gather relevant information from the market in real-time and get insights on your customers, shifts, behaviors, etc., to strengthen your position in the market. Manually handling and decoding primary, secondary, and alternative data is a great challenge. With retail intelligence, you can automate and simplify large-scale data collection and analysis with compelling visualizations.
With retail market intelligence, you can divide your market into segments and offer services to relevant and available customers.
Explore our business market intelligence solution
Price, players, and products keep constantly evolving, and you need to respond to these changes instantly. You need to capture and act on the insights in real-time.
A growing number of online businesses are investing in AI-powered market intelligence solutions to pace ahead of changing market situations. Traditional methods of gathering intelligence can be draining and time-consuming while not being as effective as real-time insights.
If the traditional methods are no longer working for your business, then it’s time that you switch to the most innovative methods of gathering intelligence.
Weigh up our market intelligence solution and see if it fits your business needs.
