The solution – turning data into revenue
The solution lies within the Merchant’s own data. More precisely, by deep-mining the full scope of a Merchant’s sales, product, customer, website and service provider data, comparing it to anonymised market data and factoring in best-practice and historically-verified formulations for online growth, the Trading Terminal uncovers hidden information that provides the keys to increasing revenues and profits.
The ITT solutions for the systemic problems in ecommerce described previously (and other issues that are raised repeatedly) are described in the sections that follow. Several fundamental convictions underlie our approach:
- Ecommerce is a sales channel and success is measured by the sales number.
- Information must be instantly consumable and actionable to be effective.
- Precise reporting and a highly-regulated ecosystem are key for success.
- Service providers are proven by sales results alone.
- A consistent sales attribution model must be followed repeatedly.
- Performance must be benchmarked against the rest of the market.
Note: It may be useful to refer to Appendix 1 – Trading Terminal feature set when reading through the descriptions that follow.
Data inundation – the ITT solution
The Trading Terminal accesses every possible data point across each IRP Merchant’s business and displays the analysed output in accessible, highly-consumable format. The information is immediately available – everything is available at the click of a button.
From high-level, highly-pertinent information right through to micro-detailed, granular analysis of every data point, the Trading Terminal provides a comprehensive, profit-focussed solution to the problem of data inundation.
Of particular importance is the Mission Control section – this is the first page that Merchants see when they log in to the Trading Terminal. Mission Control focuses Merchant’ attention on the key performance status of their business.
The Trading Terminal provides directional analytics, with a focus on sales and guiding revenue. Key information in the Mission Control dashboard includes:
- Target data – Target versus projected sales, total sales, margin, profit and AOV for any timeframe, change in sales projection versus 24 hours ago.
- Country analysis – Key country data ordered by revenue, plus identification of ‘breakout’ countries.
- Summary data – Top-level, at-a-glance overview of stock, B2C, trade, epos, telesales and marketplace sales.
- Sales summary – High-level sales stats including percentage change over 24 hours, 30 days and 12 months.
- Sales analysis – Key analysis of sales data including hourly, daily or monthly data.
- Product, category and brand analysis – Rankings, sales comparisons and growth figures, plus stock analysis.
- Payment method analysis – Stats covering all payment methods used by customers, including 3D secure transactions.
- Traffic source analysis – Service provider and channel analysis for each traffic source, including benchmarking data.
- Revenue gap analysis – Analysis of projected sales versus the potential sales if all channels were utilised maximally and conversion rates were optimised.
Uniquely with Mission Control, Merchants can click on a product and immediately dig deeper and deeper into the product data, related order detail, and so forth. This is fast, directional access to core data.
Multiplicity of tools – the ITT solution
The Trading Terminal is specific to the IRP Commerce Cloud – the ITT centralises all IRP primary data and uses it to inform intelligence. Because all analyses are auto-generated (and manually triggered when desired) for every data set from the same, single system, the Trading Terminal solves the problem of multiplicity of tools.
This is particularly evident in the Sales Analysis section. This section allows Merchants to delve deep into sales data and understand customer journeys in order to promote continual growth.
Sales Analysis contains comprehensive analytic output that Merchants can click into to view at increasingly granular levels:
- Depth analysis of brands, categories, products, stock items and platforms.
- Cross-analysis by country, sale type, traffic source, timeframe.
- Depth analysis of best & worst-selling, highest-margin and most-discounted items.
- Comprehensive stats for any dimension including sales, margin, profit, product conversion rate, AOV, sessions, views, conversion rate, average unit price, discount, shipping rate, orders, payment method stats, etc.
- Multi-element comparison charts including overlay and stack features with zoom functions to view granular detail.
- Hourly, daily or monthly data displays.
- Watch list and data-export functionality.
- Click into intelligence insights at any point to immediately take revenue-increasing actions.
Merchants can effortlessly click through from high-level information to fine-grained analytics – this is fully interconnected data and actions, all from the one system.
Inadequate revenue-focussed direction – the ITT solution
The ITT generates actionable insights – the continual feed of real-time, data-led recommendations for immediate revenue gains can be actioned at the click of a button. These insights can be viewed and managed in the ITT Intelligence Inbox.
The technology in this section is the IRP solution for inadequate revenue-focussed direction. Every insight has originated from anonymised raw data from all IRP instances, combined with the primary data of the Merchant’s own IRP, analysed by the statistical and machine learning ITT algorithms, compared with real-time and historical computations, and displayed to the Merchant in actionable format.
The insights cover hundreds of thousands of aspects of the Merchants’ business. They include ‘critical alerts’, ‘biggest financial wins’ and ‘fastest wins’. Some typical examples are:
- Average number of model images is low – 2 images per model
- 143 customers with 3 or more orders have not ordered in the last 3 months
- 18% of active models do not have multiple images
- Dropped basket email campaign with no incentive
- Re-engagement email campaign not set up
- There have been sales to China in the last 30 days but Alipay is not set up as a payment method
- Traffic source has below average growth rate
- Active models are missing images
- No email segmentation for UK
- No specific heading banner added
From the Intelligence Inbox, Merchants can then:
- View details of the alert including: category, core metric, event type and origin.
- See the ‘impact value’ of the alert and a full description of its solution.
- View key market data associated with the alert.
- Solve the issue by clicking the ‘Solve’ button and taking whatever actions are described.
- An AI-based ‘auto-solve’ option is in development that will address the question ‘Can you make the move for me that will make the most money?’
- Contact the relevant account manager straight from the interface.
There is also a specific Product Intelligence Inbox that reports on anomalies in number of views and conversion rates for categories based on data from the last 30 days.
Because the ITT has access to product margins, shipping methods, promotional prices, vouchers used, email campaigns, live chat, etc., the intelligence actions are limitless. In addition, as the machine learning system runs over time on each Merchant’s IRP instance, it will continue to learn which actions are the most profitable.
Revenue-focussed direction reaches new levels with the prediction capability and AI-assisted trading functionality built into the Trading Terminal. This allows Merchants to use AI and machine learning to predict purchase likelihoods and intervene in a way of the Merchant’s choosing in order to close sales, for example by offering immediate discounts or other incentives. When triggered, the technology detects and responds automatically to key selling opportunities.
Lack of information immediacy – the ITT solution
Because the Trading Terminal runs off primary data, it has live access to sales numbers and website usage. The Real Time section allows Merchants to understand what’s happening on their site right now.
Merchants can see immediately such key information as:
- How many customers are on site and if they are new or returning.
- Where customers are located around the world.
- Basket, checkout and order status.
- What platforms, operating systems, traffic sources and search terms are being used.
- How specific pages are being used.
This is the ITT solution for the problem of lack of information immediacy. Equipped with this information, Merchants can:
- Analyse on-site behaviour.
- Trigger an intervention (e.g. price discount) to increase the likelihood of closing a sale.
- Engage using Live Chat.
Once the ITT is activated, on-site behaviour is fed back into the machine learning model, giving Merchants the ability to analyse, predict and measure the actions that will increase sales on the website.
This is high-value functionality for ecommerce managers and website managers – and ultimately for business owners who will see the bottom line positively affected.
Imprecise attribution and accountability – the ITT solution
If ecommerce managers and business owners know how they and their service providers are performing relative to the market then they can more easily spot anomalies, make improvements, set goals and improve efficiency.
The Trading Terminal employs an agreed attribution model, benchmarking and performance ranking analysis to address the systemic problems of imprecise attribution and accountability within ecommerce. In addition to this quantitative data, qualitative feedback from owners, ecommerce managers and account managers is also utilised.
The ITT is constantly calculating who and what is providing value, monitoring performance in real time to generate ever-increasing revenues. The Comparison section contains the key analytical data for service providers:
- Service providers – for each service provider, the following data is shown:
- Total Sales, Total Spend, CPA%, Target CPA%
- Rank according to revenue generated and other performance measurements
- Traffic source sales growth comparison – Sales and growth figures, benchmarking data expressed in terms of percentile ranking for the sales from each traffic source, average percentile ranking for the traffic source sales growth comparison metrics.
- Traffic source CPA% costs comparison – CPA% and growth figures, benchmarking data expressed in terms of percentile ranking for the CPA% of each traffic source, average percentile ranking for the traffic source CPA% costs comparison metrics.
- Traffic source efficiency comparison – Efficiency rating and growth figures, benchmarking data expressed in terms of percentile ranking for the efficiency of each traffic source, average percentile ranking for the traffic source efficiency comparison metrics.
- Traffic source sales percentage comparison – Percentage contribution to sales and growth figures, benchmarking data expressed in terms of percentile ranking for sales from each traffic source, average percentile ranking for the traffic source sales percentage comparison metrics.
The Digital Village section also displays summary data for every service provider, including their name, current performance ranking, associated traffic channel, CPA%, cost, sales generated, and percentage contribution to sales. There is also summary benchmarking data expressed in terms of percentile ranking for each service, based on their performance for other Merchants.
The Digital Village section gives Merchants a real insight into staff usage patterns, industry connections and the third-party dependencies on which their ecommerce operation relies.
The ITT thus knows which service providers are proven by results and by experience and that – crucially – will be the right fit for each Merchant. By using a consistent attribution model that is followed repeatedly, sales are correctly attributed to the correct traffic sources run by the correct service providers.
Read more: Solving Ecommerce Using Data and a Market-Based Approach
Leaking revenue – the ITT solution
The lost revenue analysis generated by the Trading Terminal provides a key additional dimension for financial reporting: results are compared to agreed targets, to history and to a real, externally-driven potential figure.
For example, the ITT might highlight that, 1) a company's conversion rate is lower than the average rate for other IRP Merchants, 2) that they are not running a specific digital marketing channel that is proven to generate growth for companies in the same sector and with comparable projections and margins and 3) that their CPA for PPC is much higher than the average.
Overall, this could reveal that the company's sales should be much higher than they are, even if at first glance their results might have looked reasonably good.
This is the ITT solution for the problem of leaking revenue. The company's management team are now empowered to make some fast and effective decisions that will allow them to grow revenue further than they could otherwise have achieved without the Trading Terminal.
Read more: Lost Revenue Analysis by IRP DeepAgent (IRP Merchant log-in required)
Inefficient workflows – the ITT solution
Rather than fixing problems and fire-fighting issues, the Trading Terminal frees ecommerce teams to maintain a constant focus on increasing revenues through the website. This highlights the ITT solution for the problem of inefficient workflows. The Trading Terminal:
- Streamlines workflows for ecommerce teams, providing constant advice on where performance can be improved.
- Provides efficiency by pinpointing clear areas of action that impact on the bottom line.
- Empowers teams to spend less time analysing and more time taking actions to generate revenue.
The key for ecommerce teams is to find opportunities that can be acted on today. This could be as simple as changing a key message for a specific country, transforming its conversion rate and resulting in a huge uplift in sales – for very little time spent. Each day, teams may opt to:
- Go straight to the Intelligence Portal to begin actioning insights for immediate gains. This option represents the least work for the biggest return.
- Use the powerful Mission Control and Sales Analysis features to deeply examine, plan and act for longer-term results that can be monitored and which in turn become more input for the ITT to analyse and report on.
- Perform the above actions in parallel. All actions should increase sales immediately or over a sustained period of time.
The Trading Terminal is an essential ecommerce tool for online merchants which not only highlights areas for instant improvement, it increases efficiency operationally and will fundamentally help businesses to grow sales.
Read more: How to Use the Trading Terminal to Maximise Sales and Profits (IRP Merchant log-in required)