What is a data warehouse? Find out how good analytics can help you increase sales!

Nowadays, there are several indispensable specialist tools aiding e-shop businesses. They include platforms such as Magento, Shoper, Baselinker, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads – and these are only a few examples. Each of these tools has useful reporting features which let you control your sales results in real time. However, the challenge of combining all of them in a single report is rather backbreaking – not only requiring a lot of time and effort, but also burdened with a considerable risk of error. Data warehouses are a way to overcome these hurdles. What are they and why are they a real “must have” in the e-commerce industry?

Your business is not ready for inefficiency!

In such a competitive industry as e-commerce, meticulous analysis of all the processes taking place in your company is of vital importance. The broader the reach of your shop is, the more customers you have and the more diversified they are, the more complicated it is to manage all the gathered information. To get the big picture of the situation, you need several or even more than a dozen specialist tools!

When analysing data from each system separately, you are vulnerable to:

• significant scattering of business data, which results in the system of company processes being disrupted;
• information chaos, which consumes a lot of your employees’ time and energy before they manage to restore order;
• a significant risk of errors resulting from incorrect compilation or data or a simple human oversight.
  
  

In effect, the decision-making capabilities of your company become very limited, and the time needed to prepare and implement new sales strategies greatly increases. This leads to considerable financial losses related to sluggish action, and frequently also poor investments. In this way, you waste even more money on employing analytics specialists.
Assuming that you hire only 2 people to carry out this task, and the cost of one person-hour is 40 PLN, your monthly costs of maintaining an analytics division will reach about 13 thousand PLN!
In addition, as much as 40% of the advertising budget is wasted in this way.
Even thriving and successful companies cannot afford such losses. How to solve this problem?

The data warehouse – the best weapon against information chaos

A data warehouse is a system for coordinating and storing information. It enables the integration of data coming from different sources.
This process happens automatically and cyclically, which means that the data warehouse downloads new information by itself, refines and unifies it, and then integrates it with already existing information. The result of the process is data – ready for use in action or in further purpose analysis.
As the data warehouse stores historical data as well, it creates opportunities for carrying out comparative analyses of business results, and thus monitoring and evaluating the actions taken so far.
The data warehouse is also called “the only trustworthy source of information in the company” because it disallows any modification of the data. Consequently, you can be sure that each analysis will give you the same, meaningful results.

How can you develop your business using the data warehouse?

Data warehouses solve the most important problem of every company – the lack of transparency which prevents the optimal utilization of the company’s potential and its financial resources.

It will also ensure:

• data integrity in terms of naming and format – so that you will know exactly where to find the information that you need and you will be able to streamline the workflow in your company;
• time savings – all the data transfer and integration processes are automatic so you do not have to compile the data manually; it also lets you shorten the decision path and thus react to market trends quicker;
• transparency – you receive all the integrated data in a single report, based on which you can make well-informed business decisions;
  money savings – you optimize both your HR and marketing expenses.

All of this helps you achieve the main goals of e-commerce sales strategies:

acquisition of new users, building a positive brand image, as well as establishment of positive and long-lasting relations with your customers. In the grand scheme of things, it will result in greater profitability of your marketing activities and increased sales.

Choose WitCloud, a dedicated e-commerce platform!

Specialist data warehouses often focus on a single key aspect of the company’s activity – such as the WitCloud platform dedicated to online sales. Thanks to this, you will get only the data that is the most correlated with your business goals and will help you implement cohesive business strategies.

What can you get out of WitCloud?

• Compatibility with the systems that are the most widely used in e-commerce: Magento, Shoper, Baselinker, Google Ads, Ceneo, Facebook Ads, and many more.
• Security of your data in the BigQuery cloud technology (you can learn more about this technology and its biggest advantages here).
• Access to advanced reports. To carry out the most effective analysis, you can enhance them with additional cost data and calculate e.g. the ERS indicator (you can find a demo of the reports here).
• Easy implementation of advertising campaigns created on the basis of the reports in Facebook Ads.
• Know-how of marketing specialists with more than 10 years of experience – the combination of practical knowledge and technology provides simple, ready-to-use reports and education so that every shop can use the data warehouse / cloud on its own.
• Easy implementation of the solution: based on our customers’ experiences, we simplify our processes every day to make sure that our solutions do not require any additional programming and work automatically.
  
  
  These are only a handful of the benefits that a data warehouse can give you. You can experience all of them yourself!