The top ten commerce sites convert more than 20% of visitors into buyers during each visit to their site. The rest of merchants in the industry are lucky to reach a conversion rate of 5 percent. Armed with the right answers about your business, you can perfect the art of customer engagement and rapidly improve your conversion rates. In This Whitepaper We'll Share: - How you can use your store’s data to transform marketing, merchandising, and customer interactions into a winning online experience. - Ways that successful brands use data to manage customer acquisition and retention. - How you can use data to create a culture of testing, measuring, and learning instead of depending on guesswork and subjectivity. - When it's time to re-evaluate your current analytics tool. - What you should look for in an ecommerce analytics solution.

1.
Winning at Ecommerce
Why Your Odds Should Be Better
Than Winning At Blackjack

2.
Running an ecommerce business without
the right data can be a lot like spending a
night in Vegas…
you find yourself amid thousands of games dealing with noise, lights, and other distractions
- while staring at the vast amounts of chips and money that sit on the tables around you.
The odds are stacked against you
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Your team needs user friendly data on demand
to help your business compete against brands
large and small in noisy, crowded marketplaces
while earning the loyalty and recognition of
your target audience.
Next to your ecommerce platform - selecting
the right commerce intelligence solution for
your brand can be one of the most important
strategic decisions that you make…
It’s a simple fact in online retail that mega-brands
like Amazon and Walmart employ entire
departments and big dollars toward understanding
big data. Once they have it, they then leverage it
to make customers feel like they’re receiving
personal recommendations each time they visit
the site; bombarding them with email; and using
retargeting to stalk them across the web.
Meanwhile only 20 percent of all online retailers
actually segment their customer data - so if
you’re not in the 20 percent you could get
left behind.
So how do you gain the upper hand? Most
ecommerce teams need the ability to leverage
data, and use it to know their customers.
However, most of the analytics tools available
today are made for data analysts and people whose
passion in life is to string together queries and work
in pivot tables to pull the right set of numbers.

3.
Bet on a sure thing: your data
The odds are stacked against you
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The most successful online retailers aren’t
succeeding on brand recognition alone. Today’s
top online marketplaces win customers by
making the most out of understanding what
their customers want and how they behave
online. For example, Amazon is so well
optimized for returning visitors that 66 percent
of its sales are repeat purchases, and most
businesses are content with just half that
number of loyal customers. It’s a competitive
world. And the best online brands use data to
optimize every transaction they receive - after
all it's not fashion that drove ModCloth’s online
success story - it’s data.
There’s no shortage of buzzwords that can define
the goals of your digital marketing campaigns.
Customer-centricity, social media optimization,
personalization, omni-channel presence, the list
goes on. The top ten commerce sites convert
about 23 percent of visitors into buyers during
every session that a customer initiates with their
site. Meanwhile, the rest are lucky if they convert
five percent of site visitors into customers.
The top ten commerce sites convert about 23 percent of
visitors into buyers during every session that a customer
initiates with their site.
Meanwhile, the rest are lucky if
they convert five percent of
site visitors into customers.

4.
How easily can you analyze your store’s data?
Does your team need querying languages
(SQL,Hive,Pig), scripting languages (Python,
Matlab), statistical languages (R, SAS, SPSS),
a spreadsheet (Excel) team of analysts, and
technical data analysts to respond to what’s
trending on social media, or even this morning’s
marketing campaign performance? Your business
is affected by marketplace demand - how quickly
can you respond if sell through rates decrease?
The importance of making “data-driven” decisions
is a phrase many merchants have heard, but few
know where to begin. Their main focus is simply
keeping their store running. It begs the question,
what data should I be looking for? And how do I
use that data to make the right decisions about
my customers, my merchandise, and marketing?
Why isn’t Google Analytics enough?
Google Analytics can be a powerful first step for
many online businesses. However, for merchants,
tools like Google Analytics requires time in setting
up reports, and focuses on the wrong information,
such as page views. Google Analytics doesn’t really
tie your customer’s actions to actual revenue, and
barely scratches the surface of the type of data
that fuels growth.
That data may provide a snapshot of how the
business website is performing in retrospect. But,
looking backwards can only get businesses so far.
In short, the data offered by today’s most well-
known tools isn’t tailored specifically to the needs
of ecommerce professionals.
Meanwhile another popular option, Adobe
Analytics, requires a reporting team to set up and
then extract the data merchants need to run their
businesses. Most business intelligence solutions
require IT intervention to track and manage data.
When was the last time you asked yourself the
questions should I use Variables versus SAINT to
analyze my data? To most business users those
terms are foreign, and the questions they’re asking
themselves on a day-to-day basis are far more
straightforward. For example, what is going to
drive revenue for my area of the business, and
how can we improve customer engagement to
drive conversions?
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The importance of making “data-driven”
decisions is a phrase many merchants have
heard, but few know where to begin.
When it comes to big data,
where do you start?

5.
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The winning hand
Merchants need analytics and business
intelligence focused on commerce that they can
access on demand in order to make decisions that
drive the day-to-day success of their businesses.
For example, most analytics solutions don’t give
users top level access to whether Pinterest or
Facebook drives more revenue per visit, or about
what products they should bundle to achieve a
higher sell through rate. As an online merchant
you may have only a few unique offerings, or you
could offer thousands of individual SKUs - but you
shouldn’t have to wade through a sea of excel
sheets and reports or have to wait on technical and
data analysts to spit out the information you need
to take action.
Having improved, real-time visibility into what it is
a particular customer likes – or even where they
came from – can make all the difference in
knowing which products to offer which customers
or whether there are any opportunities to bundle
additional products in order to increase the value
of a sale. It’s something the likes of Amazon or
eBay can accomplish with a great deal of accuracy
and repeatability. But they also have the resources
to apply the appropriate amount of dollars and
staff members to get the job done.
Data is NOT for everyone, but answers should be!
Although taking the time to rapidly understand
individual customers’ interests, buying habits, and
browsing patterns seems like a luxury only available to
the top tier of merchants, new tools have emerged to
help level the playing field. Techniques that seemed
out of reach in the past are becoming available today,
but it demands merchants approach the problem
with the business user in mind.
The industry is trending toward solutions that enable
business users to self serve, and interpret their data in
a way that helps them do their job better. After all,
to compete and win, brands need a solution that can
help them be radically customer-centric so they can
connect the right customer, with the right offer or
product, at the right time. The right analytics tool
should present all of the information you need to
grow your online business in one place - and deliver it
in a way that let’s you take action and go from 0 to 60.

6.
MERCHANDISING MARKETING ORDER HISTORY
CUSTOMER DATA PURCHASE FUNNEL FINANCIAL
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Do you need a new analytics solution?
Services at a glance
Based on lessons learned from working with more than 80,000 merchants including GE, Nasty Gal, and
Bliss - we’ve created the following checklist to help you decide if your users need to adopt a new
commerce intelligence solution.
• Do you need a team to support your team when it comes to setting up reports and reviewing data?
• Has anyone on your team ever misinterpreted your store’s performance because they were looking at
the wrong data?
• Does it take more than 60 seconds to analyze your ecommerce data, and make decisions to put that
data into action?
• Does your solution require customization to develop reports, and then ongoing development work to
keep your data flowing?
• Do the concepts of learning how to use syntax, or the nuances of using variables versus SAINT seem
prohibitive to getting your data?
• How easily can you tie your customers’ actions to revenue?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you need to revisit how you approach your commerce
analytics.

7. Jirafe provides more than 80,000 merchants with daily insight to grow their revenues. Our product was
built on best practices learned from analyzing more than 425 million shopping experiences and the daily
purchase behavior of more than 65 million shoppers. We provide emerging brands like Tuckernuck, Dolls
Kill, and Diamond Candles with enterprise class ecommerce solutions that they can grow with. We also
provide larger merchants such as Nasty Gal, Nikon, and GE with a high performance, targeted
ecommerce solution to manage their business. To learn more about how Jirafe can grow your business visit
www.jirafe.com.
ABOUT JIRAFE
Conclusion
It’s hard to find new customers, and even harder to get those customers to keep coming back. More than
two out of every three visitors who put something in their shopping cart end up leaving before making the
purchase. With tools like Jirafe you can easily gain a better understanding of why customers go
somewhere else, what other items they might be interested in, and tailor offerings to build loyalty and earn
more repeat business.
Analytics, and the use of big data to drive flexible, responsive commerce, aren’t necessarily new to the
retail industry. But up until recently, anything beyond simple website performance metrics and pay-per-
click ad campaign results has generally been out of reach of the business user because they don’t “speak
data”. That’s all begun to change in recent years. A good solution should help replicate the business
analytics efforts of a major retailer without disrupting your ability to take action and drive revenue, and
without the need to beef up your staff. It should also enable you to bring transaction data to the forefront,
helping paint a clear picture of inventory, demand, up sell opportunities and whether there are any
roadblocks keeping customers from completing their purchases.
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