As an IDC report quotes, the world of digital data is expected to grow by 61% by 2025 – to a figure of around 175 zettabytes! Well, it’s not all that surprising since the use of the internet has been increasing at an unprecedented rate, especially given the current pandemic scenario.
Consequently, the world of e-commerce is also evolving quickly. People are getting more and more comfortable sitting in their homes and buying everything they need without going out. As fruitful as it is for the e-commerce industry, it’s also no less than a problem too. Such an inflow isn’t easy to handle, especially if you’re a big company.
So, to cater to the changing demands of the market and lead the e-commerce industry, including data pipelines and integration for companies is vital. And today, we’ll be talking just about that. If you’re also interested in how data pipelines and integration are crucial for e-commerce companies in today’s world, make sure you give the article a thorough read!
However, before we dive in, let’s make sure you’re fully aware of data integration and pipelines, so you’re not clueless when we’re talking about them.
Data Integration refers to combining the data from different sources and putting it in a single unified view to make it easy for the user to access and use it.
For example, data integration would enable seamless integration between a company’s e-commerce website and the back-end where the data is actually located.
Data Pipelines, on a very fundamental level, are a combination of simple steps to move data from one place to another, typically from a raw source to a given destination. For example, moving raw data from multiple sources to a dashboard where it is to be analyzed.
Background – How Data Plays a Crucial Role in Ecommerce?
Before exploring the advantages of data integration and pipelines, it’s necessary to understand data’s role. Without the data part, neither data integration nor data pipeline would be relevant.
No matter how great your products are or how big of an e-commerce company you are, as long as you don’t understand and address your customer demands, you will suffer when it comes to sales. And data is what helps you out here.
Not only does data provide you with all the insights and information you need on your customers, but it also helps you do predictive analytics so you can cater to the changing requirements of your customers or their purchasing trends.
However, collecting data isn’t difficult, and even small-scale companies can gather a significant amount of data these days. So, why are data pipelines and integration critical, and where exactly do they place a role? Let’s see.
Data Integration – The Game Changer
Data integration is the ultimate game-changer for e-commerce companies since it helps the users get a real-time overview of the business. It helps transform the data into valuable insight and provides you with all the data you need in one place.
- Seamless Shipping/Inventory Management
Shipping management and inventory management are vital when it comes to B2B SaaS businesses that deal with online store owners as clients. Shipping management can be a headache when you have multiple clients.
Monitoring and syncing inventory levels, creating shipping labels, and importing orders from multiple channels is a specialty of data integration.
- Use 100% of Your Data
As a matter of fact, an average business has access to only 25% of the data it owns. So, not only do companies waste most of the information they could have taken advantage of, but they don’t even know they have it. Imagine all you could do with that 75% of data that’s just never taken into consideration.
Data integration helps to access all the data you own and use it to enable better decision-making or understanding of your customers.
- Top-Notch Email Marketing System
Imagine having a system that automatically sends the customers emails depending upon the arrival of new products, old products sitting on the shelves too long occupying unnecessary space, or as a part of a customer loyalty program? Great, right?
Not only do such shipping management systems save you a lot of human resources, but they also make your business very proactive. Sure, the initial setup cost is high, but it undoubtedly results in great value for your money in the long run.
Data Pipelines – Making Data Instantly Accessible
Data pipelines are the core functionality when it comes to automating. While data integration helps integrate data from multiple sources, data pipelines are the underlying mechanism that helps to make it possible.
- No More Waiting to Use Your Data
Once you have the data you need, the biggest challenge is converting it into a usable form. Data is available in a wide variety of formats. And while it’s entirely possible to convert it to the format you need, it’s an exhausting job and takes a lot of time.
So, to end up on the right kind of data even after successfully collecting introduces a considerable lag in your system. And by the time your data is ready to use, it might have gotten a little too old.
How does the data pipeline help here? Well, once the pipeline is set up, it does everything for you. From collecting the data from multiple sources to cleaning and transforming it, it takes care of everything and provides you with the data in a ready-to-use format.
- Get Rid of Data Silos
Data silos are the biggest problem for big companies that manage vast amounts of customer data. Imagine the helplessness you experience when you know that you have the correct data you need, but the fact that it’s siloed voids it useless.
Data pipelines are just built to take care of such problems. They make sure that the right person can access the right data whenever they need it. Providing the sales data to the back-end team would be useless, as well as vice versa. Channeling data into the right directions helps to make the most out of it. That’s precisely why data pipelines have become a necessity if you want to lead the e-commerce industry.
Key Takeaway
Key Takeaway
We’re living in a fast-paced world; a data-driven approach is being adopted into every aspect of life, one of which is e-commerce. With the recent boom in the e-commerce industry, managing customer data has become pretty challenging, and lack of data integration and effective data pipelines have introduced a significant overhead for most e-commerce companies.
Data integration and data pipelines go hand in hand. Throughout the article, we have discussed how effectively using data integration and data pipelines could help an e-commerce business lead the industry by example and boost its efficiency.
If you’re looking for a reliable firm to help you establish top-notch data integration and pipelines, algoscale is one such data science and analytics consulting firm. It offers scalable data pipelines and a seamless data integration setup. Make sure you drop them a visit if you’re interested.
