The retail success story powered by Hadoop Big Data analytics

Customer is king. Even in this digitally interconnected era, this statement holds true by all means. Today’s customers are empowered with real-time information about anything and everything. They have within the reach of their fingertips the power to reach out for information based on which spending decisions can be made.

For businesses, the game plan definitely needs a reprisal. They can no longer try to assume that consumers will accept whatever they sell with the help of grand marketing plans. The time has arrived for businesses, online and otherwise, to know their customers deeply before putting any product out in the market.

Luckily, for businesses, technology is an unbiased resource. It takes their side too; in the form of Big Data analytical tools like Hadoop. Hadoop can help businesses gain deep insights into customer behavior, their preferences and most importantly - their needs.

Why Hadoop? What benefit does it achieve that conventional business analytical tools cannot?

Today businesses get a steady flow of unstructured data relating to customers from a wide range of sources. Traditional DBMS do not have the ability to store efficiently such large volumes of scattered and unstructured data. It is here that Hadoop makes its presence felt.

Hadoop is the world’s most popular Big Data DBMS that can store massive volumes of data relating to customer behavior collected from disparate sources like social media, email messages, texts, images and even from sensor enabled devices (Think IoT).

Within these massive volumes of data is hidden snippets of valuable information, which when interpreted from a business perspective, will give businesses economical breakthroughs.

Big Data analysis using Hadoop gives businesses a 360-degree perspective of who their customers are what their preferences are.

Retail industry is reading customer minds through digital breadcrumbs

Hadoop Big Data analytics will render companies with ground level information about customer behavior from multiple touch points. Every user, in a website or in a mobile app leaves behind digital breadcrumbs which hint at their preferences and preferences.

Observing and analyzing such digital breadcrumbs can give deep insights into the user behavior during site navigation. Such insights can be further used to bundle customized content and services which will lead to more conversions and business leads.

In other words, Hadoop analytics help businesses to literally read their customer minds without violating any privacy concerns.

Hadoop makes data analysis easy for Etsy

Take for instance the live case of Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade goods of unique nature. Etsy requires analyzing large volumes of user data in order to streamline its inventory, improve product search recommendations, related product cues, etc.

Etsy uses Hadoop map Reduce provided by Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) to analyze all user data without putting too much burden on the databases.

Amazon too joins the analytics party.

Amazon also uses Hadoop to better understand its customers using information like previous transactions, browser cookies, product wish lists, related searches and so on.

Amazon EMR analyses more than 152 million customer accounts based on click-stream data and historical purchase data to arrive at logical conclusions about the next possible customer purchase.

Given the rate at which the company is meeting its orders without running out of stock, Big Data is definitely churning good results for Amazon.

Bottom-line: ‘NOW’ is the new mantra for customer behavior analytics

These 2 online stores have 2 things in common: business never stops and customer preferences rule the day.

To leverage the steady stream of incoming traffic and to convert them into sales transactions, it is necessary for retail firms to use real-time data analysis using Hadoop like business analytic.

The application of Hadoop in retail is but only the tip of the iceberg. Services like IBM Big Data have already paved deeper inroads in entertainment, healthcare, public safety and much more.

A career in Hadoop administration

Hadoop is becoming what ERP systems were a decade back. A Hadoop administration certification is indeed a great way to set the right tone for a future that is almost at the door step. If the idea of Hadoop and what does it businesses excite you, sign up for a Hadoop admin certification and seize the opportunity.