And the power of Drill-through feature

As the e-commerce landscape becomes more lucrative-yet-competitive than ever, buyers are getting bombarded with relentless pixel-tracked ads and flashy promotional campaigns.

To stay ahead of the Hunger game and capture people’s attention, brands have no choice but to constantly monitor their sales and intervene timely with the right actions.

While there are already many tips and tricks offered out there claiming the “best ways to boost sales”, none of the websites tell you which to do first.

The problem is: Those websites are assuming that you have such problems that need their solutions, while in fact, you don’t.

For example, some sites may tell you to offer more discounts, but the truth is most of your customers are from developed countries and they don’t mind paying over their nose. Having more discounts don’t necessarily encourage them to buy more. It might even give them the wrong impression that the listed products are of low-quality.

So what’s missing?

Data.

Without data, you don’t really know if a problem is actually your problem.

You might waste resources on matters that yield negative ROI i.e poor online marketing — which is the top reason why 90% of e-commerce start-ups end in failure within the first 120 days

That is why I wrote this blog.

I will share how to use data to pinpoint your problem, and thus suggest the proper solutions to significantly improve your sales. There are 4 ways to boost your e-commerce sales using data:

• Send the right message to the right customers (demand side)
• Find out where your business falls short (demand side)
• Cater to the right merchants since the early days (supply side)
• Take action on abnormal changes instantly (brand side)

For demonstration purposes, I’ll use Holistics as a BI tool to generate and explore the data I used to make decisions.

Send the right message to the right customers

I get so frustrated when I received spam-calls from a travel agency promoting a special discount for a family vacation. One, I don’t understand why they got my phone number. Two, I don’t even have a wife and children (yet…) to even be eligible for that discount. Although I’m a keen traveler myself, there’s no way I can enjoy that.

The travel agency just lost a few cents of call. Plus, they lost me — a potential customer — which could translate into a few hundred dollars.

Finding the right customer segments is critical in defining the right marketing message. With the right tool, that process is faster and effortless. Holistics will not only help you create high-level dashboards like this:

but it also enables business users to dive into those data and find game-changing insights.

At first glance, everything seems great: GMV is rising through the years, and there’s a growing number of buyers. First, we’ll need to discover the under-performing countries.

Taking a closer look, though, we’ll find Singapore ranks the lowest when it comes to revenue. But Singapore is still too large a segment. Using Holistic’s Drill-through feature, we can easily break down Singapore's revenue to a more granular level:

Here, we can see that our store’s revenue in Singapore has been on a downward trend since late 2018. This is quite alarming as other countries’ revenues have been going in the opposite direction.

At this point, you might want to know the contact information (name, email) of people in Singapore to target via a marketing campaign. It’s easily noticeable that Body is the most preferred category in Singapore, so we’ll prioritize finding out the people who purchased it first.

The Customer Demographics dashboard shows that a majority of Body buyers are female who ages under 20. In this case, a large discount may appeal to them, since they are probably students who don’t have a stable income stream.

Knowing our target user’s name and gender, we can craft highly targeted email or Facebook ads campaign, where we might use more lively colors and promote female products (as Adidas creatively did in one of their email campaigns)

We can even go extra miles by finding their birthdate, and use Automated Email Marketing tools like MailChimp or ConvertKit to send special offers on their birthday. (Do you know that Birthday emails can yield up to 342% higher revenue per message?)

Find out where your business falls short

Holistics is extremely helpful when it comes to visualizing eCommerce metrics, especially conversion rates. Using Holistics, you can easily graph out your conversion funnel using the Funnel visual type.

In our example, we notice a huge amount of orders are canceled orders (35%) — which means a ton of money was wasted on logistics, human management, and business operation.

The most important step to be taken in the case of high cancellation rates is identifying the reasons for these occurrences. With Holistics, we only need to use Drill-through to find the contact information of those who canceled and reached out to them. Needing more information? Hit Explore and add some more fields to the table!

Again, it’s the act of verifying which of the below problem is actually your problem:

• Poor customer service: After placing an order, customers might have questions, requests or complaints which, left unattended, might lead to annoyance and thus cancellation.
• Too long delivery time: By the time people click Order, their patience clock already starts ticking. If they don’t receive the goods within the promised time, they might feel frustrated and cancel the orders.
• Unclear order status: If your website keeps displaying “Pending merchants’ approval” for a good, although it might have been processed, it’s highly likely people think it’s a malfunction and they will cancel the orders.
• High price: It’s understandable for customers to buy from the cheapest vendor. If the merchants on your platform price their products too high, people might find another cheaper alternative and cancel their orders.

There are many other problems, but the bottom line is we should be able to reach those who canceled to understand the underlying reason(s).

Airfrov, an eCommerce online retail company — also a client of Holistics, has applied the same strategy to reduce cancellation rates significantly. Citra (digital marketing executive) and her team leverage data like trending items, keywords searched, product requests, and fulfillment rates to help the marketing team decide what promotions to run.

For instance, if they notice a high number of requests for a product but the fulfillment rate is low, they decide not to promote it, to avoid the chances of users being disappointed by cancellations or denials. If both demand and fulfillment rate is high, the marketing team promotes the product to users.

Cater to merchants since the early days

Merchants are also your customers. To some extent, it is more difficult to familiarize them with the platform because unlike buyers, they will be constantly working with us and using our process. With Holistics, we have a tool to monitor their usage to give them a “nudge” at the right time.

Reduce merchant onboarding time

Each e-commerce platform has its own procedure to go through, and often it is complicated. However, Holistics’s 19 visualization types will cater to the most complicated tracking needs.

Market disruptors like Fave put their laser-focus on minimizing the on-boarding time for merchants. Whenever merchants sign up to join the Fave platform, they go through various stages, such as editorial content production, quality assurance, setting up deals, and more.

The operations team tracks this process closely using Holistics and aims to reduce the time the merchant takes to go through each department.

This eases the process for the merchant and also helps prevent them from dropping out of the process. Most importantly, it helps them to start selling deals earlier.

You can read more about Fav’s case study here.

Identify under-performing merchants

To identify merchants with the lowest GMV, simply use Sort. You can also leverage Conditional Formatting to change the cell's color based on the revenue. That way it's much easier to detect weak performers.

After identifying the merchants’ contacts, we should find out the underlying problem by taking a close look at each merchant. Finding the common pattern among those merchants is our goal here. This might be a lot of leg work, but it’s worth it to pinpoint the true root causes, which could be:

• Your site lacks special conditions/added-value offers for merchants
• Sellers lack proper educational program

To learn more about how to attract merchants, check out this dedicated post by Cs-cart!

Take actions on abnormal changes in time

At Holistics, we know that the reports are meaningless unless they are shared with relevant stakeholders. Therefore, we have developed Embedded Analytics to help you embed the dashboards wherever most accessible for you, and quickly identify abnormalities at your own disposal.

You can also use Add Schedule to send information to your email or slack channel at a specified time and frequency depending on your need. If you need to send these dashboards to your merchants, personalize the Email Subject and Email Body.

This is how it looks in reality

Keeping such information as the merchant’s health transparent is vital to both merchants themselves and your company. While you might be conscious of improving your sales over time, sometimes it’s the merchants that understand the market the most and know when (or how) to take action.

Conclusion

Above are some of the ways you can use to make data-driven decisions for your eCommerce business. Essentially, we can use data to:

• Discover the right segments of users (thus, better message!)
• Discover drop-offs in our conversion funnel (and the reasons)
• Discover underperforming merchants, their pain points, and their behaviors (thus, better support)
• Make timely decisions before our competitors (thus, better market advantage!)

I hope this blog post has given you an idea of how to explore your data and apply insights into boosting your eCommerce business. You can learn more about how other companies are using Holistics to improve their business in our case studies.

If you’re still on the fence about how your data looks like in Holistics, don’t hesitate to request a trial or contact us for a consultation!

Originally published at https://www.holistics.io on May 29, 2020.

Use Holistics to boost your eCommerce sales with data was originally published in Holistics.io on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Looker is a business intelligence solution that provides an innovative approach for real-time data exploration and analytics. However, in spite of all its wonderful features, you may find that Looker is not perfectly suited for your team due to its expensive pricing plan, weak scalability and high learning curve. For more comprehensive analysis of Looker, feel free to check its strengths and weaknesses here.

In this article, we will help you curate the top 5 affordable and open-source Looker alternatives, offering not only their own robust feature sets such as data modeling, self-service analytics, data reusability, etc. but also more flexible pricing plans. Hopefully, after reading our blog post, you’ll find the Looker alternative that best fits your needs.

Holistics

Holistics is a powerful full-stack data platform that allows companies to set up an end-to-end, reusable, and scalable data analytics stack with minimal engineering resources. It not only enables analysts with SQL to build a data warehouse and automate reporting but also empowers non-technical users to get insights with a strong self-service analytics offering.

Pricing

Fair and scalable pricing, starting from $500/month; also offers a special plan for startups

Pros

• No learning curve
• Self-service analytics with a drag-and-drop interface for non-technical users
• Centralized data management that prevents data knowledge from being locked to a few individuals
• Powerful data modeling for scalable data analytics stack
• ETL & automated workflow with numerous integrations
• Powerful delivery capabilities via Email/Slack Schedule and Alerts, Shareable links and Embedded Analytics
• Advanced SQL Workspace that allows data analysts work efficiently

Cons

• Young product with some features still in progress
• Strong permission control but complicated for small companies
• Doesn’t support complicated charts

For more comparison details, we have written an in-depth article on Holistics vs Looker, so feel free to check if Holistics is your best affordable alternative to Looker.

Metabase

Metabase is an open-source business intelligence tool that makes analytics accessible to everyone without knowledge of SQL. This Looker alternative lets you ask questions about your data and displays answers in formats that make sense, whether that’s a bar graph or a detailed table.

However, Metabase’s data modeling functionality is very limited, giving you only the most basic ability to define logic and relationships between data models. That said, we think Metabase is perfect for teams that do not need to do very complex things with their data.

Pricing

Free business intelligence software

Pros

• Free business intelligence tool
• Open-source
• Light weight
• Simplified and easy-to-use interface, which is suitable for the less technical-savvy

Cons

• Have to set-up on your own server and need to maintain the infrastructure
• Limited multiple integrations
• Limited variety of charts and settings
• Weak permission control
• Not suitable for comprehensive and ad-hoc analytics
• Rudimentary data modeling layer, nowhere near Looker’s data modeling.

Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense is a dynamic self-service analytics and visualization tool that simplifies data exploration for a full spectrum of users. With intuitive data prep, drag-and-drop abilities and drill-down features, organizations can easily spot and share data relationships and key insights quickly and efficiently.

Pricing

Free and Starting from $15/user per month

Pros

• Helpful self-service analytics with a drag-and-drop interface
• Provide predictive analysis and trend indicators
• Allow centralized management through centralizing locations for users to develop and sharing apps, data stories and insights quickly and efficiently
• Robust mobile apps, designed with a mobile-first attitude

Cons

• Inflexible data extraction capabilities
• Limited visualization due to lack of some basic charts
• Complicated token pricing model
• Data solution is normally sluggish when working with large data sets
• Non-SQL based data modeling layer

Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a cloud-based business intelligence and analytics service that provides a full overview of your most critical data. Connecting to all of your data sources, Power BI simplifies data evaluation and sharing with scalable dashboards, interactive reports, embedded visuals and more.

Pricing

Free and starting from $9.99 per user per month

Pros

• A free cloud-based business intelligence service
• Excel-like and easy-to-use interface with the ability to create and import simple visuals, thus empowering Excel users
• Good report visualization capabilities with numerous data chart types
• Allow you not only to connect to various data sources but also heavily integrate with Microsoft’s portfolio such as Office 365, Microsoft Excel, Azure, and SQL Server
• Comes with a powerful data modeling layer

Cons

• Intuitive to power Excel users
• Doesn’t handle large data sources well
• Pretty complex to understand and use
• Insufficient BI initiatives, for example, there is no way to publish reports and associated data together with Power BI Desktop
• Users have to learn DAX/PowerM in order to be effective.
• Data models can only be used on Windows machines
• Powerful but heavy

Sisense

The last Looker alternative that we would like to recommend to you is Sisense. It is a business intelligence platform helping you come up with data-driven decisions by redefining all aspects of business analytics. The solution is known for providing instant answers so that you get to immediately reap its benefits, resulting in early ROI delivery. Sisense is easy to use, sporting a drag-and-drop feature, making it one of the most popular solutions of its kind.

Pricing

Not really best-suit for Startups, but is a bit more affordable than Looker pricing plan

Pros

• Offer both an on-premise and cloud-based option
• High ability to work with large datasets by using a columnar database approach, which makes it easier for the Sisense system to pull big queries
• Sisense’s Elasticube™ allowing users to take data snapshots
• Fast implementation and time to insights with well-designed dashboards and various chart types

Cons

• Require high power of server, amount of space and resources
• Require a certain period of time for setup, configuration, and user adoption
• Elasticube functionality tends to be time-consuming and prone to errors, especially with failure to build errors

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, when it comes to choosing the right Looker alternatives for your team, we have plenty of business intelligence options to choose from. We encourage you to contact these vendors directly if you would like to learn more about their solutions, in order to discover how it might best fit into your team’s needs!

Originally published at https://www.holistics.io on August 14, 2019.

Top 5 Affordable and Open-source Alternatives to Looker in 2019 was originally published in Holistics.io on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The feature was first popularized from Lotus Improv, a spreadsheet program. Since then, it has become a very popular concept, present in ubiquitous programs like Excel, to data tools working with structured data.

• It helps you to summarize and categorize a large amount of raw data into meaningful insights in a single table (e.g. what are my quarterly sales figures this year, compared to last)?
• It helps you create tabular insights quickly and concisely without using Excel functions or SQL

A Quick Example
Imagine that you have a Data Table regarding each and every transaction of different customers in different locations and across different times, for an E-Commerce company that contains hundreds or millions of rows of raw data.

You need to answer these 2 questions. How would you do it?

• The amount of products purchased by each customer
• The amount of products purchased on a specific date

It would be quite complicated if you want to generate this report with Excel, since you have to set column names, copy column user emails to another sheet, remove duplicates and execute a “SumIf” function to return the total quantity of each customer.

However, with Pivot Tables, it would be much easier, which you can see in the video below:

You can simply drag User Email to Row and Order Quantity to Values, just 2 clicks and it will give you a perfect report, with all the Data you need without using any formulas or functions.

Another example would be generating a report regarding Order status through time by gender

The concept is simple, you have a raw dataset, and you apply some transformations (called pivoting), to get the resulting pivot table.
The raw dataset would usually be a spreadsheet of data.

Concepts:

• Values: This usually takes a field that has numerical values that can be used for different types of calculations.
  For example: the total number order.

• Rows: used to apply a filter to one or more rows that have to be shown in the pivot table.
  For example: if Category is dragged onto this area, then the other output table constructed will have values from the column “ Category”

• Columns: used to apply a filter to one or more columns that have to be shown in the pivot table.
  For example: if Order Created At is dragged onto this area then the other output table constructed will have values from the column “ Order Created At”

• Filters: used to apply a filter to an entire table.
  For example: Order Created before 15–09–2017

• A closer look at the Pivoting mechanism

Take this example on the Cloud Pivot free tool. This example illustrates the transactions of an E-Commerce company which includes data like Product Information, Customer Information, Order Details and so on.

This is an example of a dataset that you need to pivot.

Example 1: How many products has each customer purchased?

You need to define the table rows and values

1. Add User Email to Rows Area
2. Add Order Quantity to Values Area
   Just like that, the Pivot table has automatically aggregated the number of Orders (a Count of Order id) that each customer has made:

Example 2: The amount of each type of product that has been purchased through time

In this case, you would have to add Order created at to Column area.

FAQs

Blank Cell in your Pivot Table

As you can see, the Pivot Table contains Blanks and this happens most commonly because the source data just does not contain an entry for that particular Sub-total. In the example above, this could be because the particular product category did not have any orders on Oct 01 2016.

Originally published at https://www.holistics.io on October 1, 2018.

What is a Pivot Table? was originally published in Holistics.io on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.