e4m-mFilterIt Roundtable: Experts discuss need for business intelligence in e-commerce

With business intelligence becoming an integral part of operations and decision-making for brands worldwide, e4m and mFilterIt organised a roundtable to discuss the topic ‘Winning E-Commerce with Business Intelligence’ on Friday in tech hub Bengaluru.

The speakers in the roundtable included Taranjeet Kaur, VP- Media, Digital Marketing & Brand PR, Tata Consumer Products, Afzal Hussain, Ecommerce Head, Titan Company Limited, Ashwin Ravi Kumar, Head - D2C Ecommerce Marketplaces, PUMA, Balaji Huskur, Head of Ecommerce Duroflex, Mehul Malviya, General Manager - E Business Growth, Sri Sri Tattva, Rajat Mohan, General Manager, E-commerce , Wipro Consumer Care, Sundar Ganapathy, Head of E commerce General Mills India Pvt. Ltd and Vaibhav Arora ,Vice President Ecommerce, WOW Skin Science. The discussion was moderated by Ajay Macaden, Chief Evangelist-Ecommerce, mFilterIt.

The roundtable held important topics of discussion including the essential KPIs and metrics that e-commerce companies should track using BI, key challenges and opportunities in leveraging business intelligence in today’s e-commerce ecosystem and what role does business intelligence play in shaping future of e-commerce.

Afzal Hussain of Titan Company spoke about the important metrics to track using BI. “The one metric that has survived multiple hypothesis testing, is searches. As long as your searches are strong and growing, your brand will not decline. You don't need to lose sleep at night. As long as the searches are in good shape. After searches, it's the funnels, impressions, clicks, visits, units. These are the primary metrics. The secondary metrics revolve around measuring the imaginary of the brand. For example, for let's say fast track, which is a youth fashion brand. I will see what is the share of searches, traffic and sales of a basket of consumers who are buying let's say Levis, jeans, T shirts, roaster shoes and so on. So that's my process, traffic funnel from top to bottom has been processed.”

Speaking about the evolution of the ecommerce ecosystem and how Business Intelligence is highly important in today’s world, Taranjeet Kaur of Titan says, “E-commerce platforms themselves are evolving right now. If you look at voice search, which is now enabled in Amazon or even visual search which is enabled in e-commerce platforms, that is all fueling what you are going to do next in BI. Tomorrow you will start having analysis of how many people have actually done a search on voice and then do analytics on that versus what you're doing right now.

“There is a lot of elements around how this data or data driven marketing or decisions have to be taken so it's great to have a lot of pieces of information. We keep talking about data is Goldmine but if you really don't know how to use it, it's just another tool,” she adds.