There’s no getting around the fact that retail is a highly competitive business, if not downright cutthroat.

It’s filled with hundreds, if not thousands of players, all wanting to be the next big thing. But that’s easier said than done. Because of the fact there are so many players in the market, there’s definitely something that a particular retailer has to do if they want to separate themselves from the competition.

One thing that they can do is price their products low and give excellent customer service. But, at the end of the day, that’s not nearly enough.

What more do you have to do though? I mean, it feels like you’ve done everything to keep your customers loyal to you, and if that’s not enough, then it looks like you’ve hit a brick wall.

Big Data—What Is It?

But that’s definitely not all you can do. You can analyse market trends and customer’s buying patterns to see what you can offer them, what you can encourage them to buy, things that they never thought that they’d need. That’s where big data comes in.

Simply put, big data is large sets of data on a particular field, in this case, retail and customer shopping habits.

Collecting this data through online surveys and social media networks, you can process this data to give you actually meaningful ideas on what to do with your business. This can be anywhere from introducing new products onto your catalog, ensuring that you have the latest products to offer, to predicting trends and buyer patterns before they even happen, ensuring that you’re one step ahead of the curve.

Here are some of the advantages that big data can offer retailers.

Recommendation Engines:

Simply put, this is basically showing the customer a list of products that they might want to buy after they have selected to purchase a product. A case for a smartphone, a new pair of gloves after buying a set of power tools, and so on. This may not be immediately apparent to the customer, but they’ll encourage the customer to buy them, since they won’t usually have these things in mind when they set out to buy a new item.

Price Optimisation:

This is something that can directly help out retailers. Through big data retail analytics, retailers can find out how to competitively price their products with regards to their competition and the customers that they intend on attracting. Not only does this mean more customers may visit their site, but it also ensures that lower volume items can be priced higher if needed, during a time when customers are loyal to the particular retailer.

Inventory Optimisation:

No one likes having a huge warehouse of stock that never moves. Through analysing big data, retailers can find out how to effectively stock their inventory, keeping high stocks of high moving products and low volumes of slow moving products, ensuring that there is no period where the warehouse is backed up with products that won’t sell and are taking up precious space.

Trend Forecasting:

There’s something to be said for being ahead of the competition. With big data analysis using tools like Apache Spark and Hadoop, you can effectively find out which products are going to be trendy in the future, and which would be better just left off the shelf. This gives you a lot more flexible power in terms of stocking inventory and keeping up with buyers’ demands. Let’s face it, we’d rather have a website have a product we want in stock than flash “Out of stock” in front of our eyes.

These are just a few of the methods that are putting big data on the center of the board for retailers. This means that they can find out how and through which methods they can use to keep both their customers happy and stay ahead of the other competition.