In the era of e-commerce, it is prudent for any business to come up with an elaborate plan on increasing sales and presence online. The use of the internet has transformed business operations worldwide (Loshin, 2008). It has been found that many people are turning to the internet to purchase books (Foucault & Scheufele, 2002). My employer is one of the largest book-selling companies online.
My new job portfolio will involve overseeing the planning and implementation of a new enterprise-level customer management system. The primary goal of the system in our company is to increase book sales by understanding our customer dynamics, existing and potential markets. Dataset is a collection of records contained in a file. In this paper I will develop an elaborate plan for the system, evaluate the core business process steps for online bookselling and give examples of applications of datasets.
High level plan
Google Analytics is a useful platform on the World Wide Web that has several applications to a business that is conducting transactions online. It is used by top management, content developers and marketing professionals to understand and evaluate performance of an enterprise. Google Analytics will be used to analyze e-commerce data points. These are the attributes that are available on the internet regarding customers who have transacted online (Loshin, 2008). Customers’ location, traffic trends, search terms used by visitors, time visitors spend on particular pages, point at which customers leave the website and what customers do in the site are some of the data points accessible through the Google Analytics. Location of customers will be vital to plan on where to put more marketing campaigns (Foucault & Scheufele, 2002).
These data points will help to decipher how often customers visit the company’s website and if they transact any business. Even if they do not do any transaction, their trafficking trends will be analyzed to convert visitors into customers. When visitors spend more time on some pages than on others, it appears that the pages are more interesting than the others. These are the pages that will be added content for business transactions. The marketing department will also know the adverts on the website that are attracting visitors and facilitating more business transactions than others (Loshin, 2008).
Evaluation
Typical business processes in internet book-selling business include shipping, inventory and billing. This system will have an elaborate inventory platform where goods in store will be monitored online. It will also indicate the shipping and billing records of customers. Other customer data that will be integrated with Google data include; buying capacity, individual or institutional buying, the gender and age of customers (Foucault & Scheufele, 2002).
Examples of datasets applications
Datasets integration will have several applications in online selling of books business. Shipping data will be compared with Google data to understand the areas with growth in sales for a book product. The gender and age data will help in planning for selling products to specific gender and age groups. Further, Google data will be used to know whether institutions surpass individuals in purchasing specific book products or vice-versa. Billing and payment data will provide an understanding on how prompt customers are able to pay for products and the common and safe payment modes used. Periodical transactions data will also give ideas on months of the year that have better sales than the others.
References
Foucault, B. E., & Scheufele, D. A. (2002). Web vs campus store? Why students buy textbooks online. Journal of consumer Marketing, 19(5), 409-423.
Loshin, D. (2008). Master data management. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann.