8CIOReview | | AUGUST 2022IN MY OPINIONAs more consumers are relying on e-commerce platforms for purchasing their groceries, home decor, electronics and more, matured platforms are collecting data to understand customer behavior and leverage it to generate insights that help improve customer experience leading to higher purchase rate, long term customer loyalty and eventually higher market share. Millions of active and engaged customers browsing hundreds of products during their purchase cycle, generates petabytes of data capturing what customers are looking for, how they are finding it and more importantly what's preventing them from making the purchase at that moment; it could range from product selection, pricing, what other customers are saying about the quality of product in the reviews, how quickly it will it be delivered, is the website intuitive to navigate and so on. Data and insights backed decisions could really be a strategic advantage if envisioned and executed right. Most e-commerce companies in their early years, including Wayfair, start with a hybrid team with a group of business intelligence experts who do a bit of everything, ranging from managing infrastructure/ ETLs, building appropriate data models, developing dashboards, setting up and analyzing experiments and generating insights to drive business strategy. However as they scale, cost of suboptimal execution becomes more expensive as constant tool migrations, unstable ETLs, poorly setup experiments could really slow down a rapidly growing business. Late 2017, Wayfair started setting up a vision of evolving our analytics with more defined verticals within Product Analytics that can support a business eyeing 100Bn revenue in the next few years. First, the foundation of any product analytics organization is the data engineering team that can define what customer behavior to capture in the data, how to model it for efficient storage and deliver insights at speed of thought in a stable and reliable environment. This needs careful selection of tag management tools, cloud based storage platforms and highly CRITICAL ELEMENTS OF A DATA DRIVEN PRODUCT ORGANIZATION IN E-COMMERCE Ankit MangalBy Ankit Mangal, Director, Advanced Analytics and Insights, Wayfair
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