Sales and Order Prediction for Ecommerce Business

Although predictive analytics has been growing rapidly creating new tools and solutions equipped with advanced learning algorithms, business keeps investing and adopting new, sometimes completely innovate solutions, which can greatly help them manage big data. One of many available sources of information is a sales process that plays a critical role in developing new businesses. As a result, using machine learning, more affordable and easy to use platforms for e-commerce business can be developed, especially in sales and order prediction.

Influence of Machine Learning on e-commerce business in sales and order prediction

The ML ability to continuously learn from new information and detect new demands and trends can improve the general efficiency of ecommerce business. From a technological standpoint, while predictive analytics requires a human to find statistical trends in data and information, machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that uses algorithms to find trends. Following this idea, computers can autonomously make predictions based on these trends. Two major areas in which machine learning is deployed include product recommendation and the pricing process.

Furthermore, with the explosive growth of data, one of the biggest reasons why companies are able to demolish their competitors in the ecommerce industry is due to their incredible advanced recommendation engine which is largely based on machine learning. After absorbing millions of records of customer purchasing habits along with their profiles, the system is able to predict how a new user might browse a web service or what products they may be interested in. The more accurate these recommendations are to the customers’ needs, the more likely they are to purchase additional items. With predictive analytics on board, companies can even pass their current limitations improving their entire business model and customer satisfaction.

Read more about The best Machine Learning Use Cases in E-commerce 

Opportunities for predictive analytics tools on ecommerce in sales and order prediction

For many companies, sales prediction can rely only on a simple excel sheet and a percent that can be applied creating a simple order forecast. Some companies, however, prefer to use more sophisticated tools to calculate and break down sales for a preferred period with greater accuracy. Taking into account additional parameters such as a number of leads, orders, sales costs or the final number of sold products, e-commerce platforms equipped with predictive analytics tools can not only analyze data and improve the process of business decision making, but also maintain this information for future company use.

Looking at some examples of solutions that add additional value, predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms can make a big impact on pricing optimization, segmentation, and targeting processes. E-commerce services sometimes suffer a significant degree of separation from their customers. Apart from giving the right recommendation regarding the potential products to buy, a machine learning system can also adjust an e-commerce website to client preferences. In effect, the platform personalizes the customer’s experience to get them to buy improving the general sales results.

What is more, using this digital data, the algorithms can optimize the sales processes automatically whenever a business process misses assigned goals.

Pricing

Every company knows that pricing is really important in business; online pricing is even more critically significant as a client is not afraid to get a better deal and can very quickly verify which e-commerce business offers the cheapest service or product. On the other hand, the manual process of estimating prices is not as effective as other available solutions where prices can be changed dynamically using predictive analytics and considering many factors at once such as competitors’ prices, time of day, general demand or type of customer.

As result companies could benefit from predictive models that can allow determining the best available price for each particular product. All of these can influence the price and give positive results in selling forecasts.

Determining sales patterns

For scale-ups and growing businesses, the knowledge about the company sales patterns and customer behaviors can be crucial to understand the reasons why their services or products are being sold easily in one region and difficulty in another one. In this case, machine learning algorithms can also explain a company’s target group, its ability to transfer sales patterns from local into a global scale business or recommend products to each group of customers more precisely. Having clear insights about the main market players, their current business potential and services, artificial intelligence solutions can help companies to create the best offer for a customer at the appropriate time.

Determining customer lifetime value

Moving forward, a customer lifetime value is one of the most important elements of a business development plan, not only in the ecommerce sector but also in other industries. The predicted amounts of money which each customer can bring into a company are the foundation for calculating future company cash flow. The time and energy-consuming calculation process does not always guarantee that the results will satisfy a company.

A better way to handle it is to use predictive analytical systems that can look at data deeper adjusting marketing campaigns and advertisements according to the company’s strategic goals. Any company which cares about their business will definitely consider having systems that can save money and increase the quality of results at the same time.

Use predictive analytics and ML algorithms to predict sales and order

A smart way to improve the process of order predictions is to use predictive analytics capabilities and machine learning algorithms which allow e-commerce businesses to break down sales in detail and promote their products among the right customer segments.

Thus, machine learning solutions can closely verify and predict customer behavior and create the foundation for any marketing campaign. Definitely, new innovative analytical solutions can help both small and big companies to run a business successfully.

Increase the retention rate and automatically adapt prices of your products

Predictions such as whether a given client will make a purchase in a specific product segment or if he or she returns in the future, are the main information inputs for order forecasts changeable in real-time so that a seller can react accordingly regarding the sales status. What is more, machine learning algorithms are able to predict which customers are risky to leave and give companies warrants about this. Such an implemented system can increase the retention rate and can bring a stable stream of revenue based on long term sales projections.

The concept of automatically adapting prices on the basic level can simply increase prices when the demand for a product is high and decrease them when the demand is low. From the perspective of a customer, the technique can have both positive as well as negative effects. Some customers can regret their shopping process when they see the price dropping minutes later. For others, however, dynamic prices can turn out to be a game in which they would like to try to hunt the best prices.

To Sum up – Predictive analytics and ML are a great opportunity for increasing sales and developing order prediction in e-commerce

Generally, predictive analytics and machine learning solutions have opened up a broad range of options for an e-commerce business for increasing sales and developing order prediction. With customer segmentation, churn prediction and sentiment analysis, it’s quite apparent that advances in deep computer science can give easier access to potential customers and define new relations between customers and offered products and services. Definitely, it will be exciting to see how given examples of machine learning usage, especially in e-commerce businesses will continue to shape the future of the industry.

We hope that you liked our article, let us know what do you think! If you have any additional questions about the influence of machine learning services on ecommerce business don’t hesitate to contact us.