BIG DATA IN E-COMMERCE

GLOBAL ECONOMIC INFORMATION SYSTEM

KT304H – M01

Group 3

Nguyễn Bình Giang B2112372

Trang Bảo Di B2112360
Thái Lan Anh B2112364
Nguyễn Huỳnh Yến Nhi B2108110
Nguyễn Văn Phúc An B2112360
 BIG DATA IN E-COMMERCE

In the present day, Big Data is becoming an incredibly important way that
companies are using to compete, innovate and draw informed decisions for their firm.
From the healthcare industry to large-scale industries and so many others, the data that
companies take advantage of could be extremely valuable in improving products
based on how customers are really using them. There is also an increasing emphasis
on big data analytics in e-commerce. In the past few years, a spiral of interest in big
data in the e-commerce industry has driven e-commerce companies to use more data
from transactions to provide insights. According to VnEconomy, Vietnam is ranked
2nd in the number of people who make an order online and this has reached more than
51 million people, an increase of 13.5% over the previous year. This is indeed making
E-commerce platforms such as Shopee, Tiki, or Lazada aware of utilizing valuable
data in forecasting trends, improving customer experience, and making informed
decisions.

It is initially required to create a system for collecting client data in order to

construct an efficient and reasonable plan. After that, you can increase sales by
immediately analyzing client wants. Applications of big data that help with this
objective include:
Forecasting customer needs: Businesses will experience considerable losses as a
result of the expenditures associated with maintaining inventory when things that are
in stock do not result in sales. Not to mention that these items may lose their
usefulness or expire with time. Additionally, prolonged storage increases the risk of
deterioration.
To be able to provide recommendations, data and factors in real time analysis, such as
market status, sales history, customer preferences, dealer location, and rival situation,
are used. knowledge about future requirements. Businesses are now able to make
effective stocking strategies and predict the kinds of products that will be in demand
with high probability thanks to well-chosen algorithms. Profits can therefore be
maximized.
Price optimization: In order to compute pricing and offer customers the greatest
discounts while retaining the highest margins feasible, big data analytics technologies
pull price-impacting data from several consumer touchpoints and other sources. Based
on predetermined algorithms and criteria, they carry out these calculations
automatically and in real time, assisting e-store owners in making more strategic data-
driven price decisions.
Supply chain management: Predictive analytics of real-time telemetry data collected
from smart sensors distributed along the production line can also help suppliers
prevent problems and minimize downtime. If a failure occurs, Big data models can
identify the cause and prevent similar problems from recurring in the future.
Customer experience: Big data can offer insights into consumer behavior from a
variety of consumer channels, including websites, social media, web searches, and
online surveys. Businesses can then recommend items and services that customers
would like to utilize in real time by understanding their requirements and preferences.
This improves the experience for the customer.
Secure online payment: Real-time analytics of big data streams helps e-commerce
businesses identify anomalies that could indicate fraud to spot suspicious transactions
as they happen. Big data solutions drill down into customer information and past
purchases and track repetitive patterns to distinguish between legitimate and
suspicious transactions and recommend the most appropriate course of action to
combat cybercrime.
Moreover, E-commerce also use Machine Learning to learns from patterns in the past
using a set of algorithms in order to give customers the relevant result for their search
of goods.
According to Reputa’s report, the complicated COVID-19 epidemic has caused many
negative impacts on economic sectors around the world. However, for the e-
commerce industry, COVID-19 seems to have presented a great opportunity, with the
number of user discussions1 in 2021 increasing 7 times compared to 2020.

The number of discussions of E-commerce platform in 2021 (Reputa.vn)

Besides, Payment Experience and Web/App Experience are gradually getting more
attention from customers when 04 e-commerce floors all increase in 2021. In addition,
the discussion about Goods is still at the top (50% of the total discussion). Most
discuss: Quality of goods, Reputation of the platform, buying encouragement. By
collecting data, these E-commerce platforms would generate the business value – the
generation of economically worthy insights and benefits by analyzing big data.
1
Discussion or Share of voice (SOV) is a measure of the market your brand owns compared to you competitors.
It acts as a scale for your brand visibility and how much you dominate the conversation in your industry.
Information value shed lights on real time decision making and strategic value deals
with gaining competitive advantages. For instance, by collecting data about
customer’s age when joining in the platform, they will know their customers are
mainly the Millennials and Generation Z. These two kinds of customer might provide
them a big value in sales and revenue through online shopping in the pandemic.
Customer gender, moreover, will tell them what kind of goods in the market are the
most common bought.

Customer age and customer of 4 big E-commerces

From the data collected, there is a majority in the female customer over the male in 4
platforms. This tells the firms that they need to focus on some of the goods such as:
cosmetics, fashion, food commodity, household items,… in order to increase revenue
or a far-reaching benefit – the customer experience. The experience that customer
have when surfing the platform is extremely important. It affects their buying
psychology through their own experience of purchasing goods online. Giving some
feedbacks of the goods, E-commerce platforms encourage people to give them an
honest comment of how you feel or what they should improve in the next time you
buy things from them.
According to Reputa, more than 31% of customer choose to buy goods online if the
prestige level of E-commerce or over 25% contented with promotions and the
collection of vouchers discount. The feedback, however, also tells why people don’t
choose to make an order online. In the second quarter, there was a huge amount of
goods ordered from customers that leading to the late delivery time or goods did not
reach the customer (27% of people did not choose E-commerce to buy merchandise).
Moreover, there is also an anxiety of counterfeiting (20.45%). Through these data,
firms need to ensure that customers would satisfied when shopping online, which is
becoming more significant. Real-time data analytics enables firms to offer
personalized services assist firms to separate loyal customers from new customers, and
to make promotional offers accordingly..
 Motivations and Objections (Reputa.vn)

In order to enhance the reputation, prestige, and satisfaction of the platform, firms try
to get insights from the data they have collected. Lazada recorded the most
discussions compared to the other exchanges (992 articles), 1,4 times higher than
Shopee (700), Sendo (686). This shows that the effort to improve the shopping
experience, especially the delivery speed thanks to the solid logistics system during
the epidemic season, has created a change in the buying trends of consumers.
Following Lazada closely, Tiki is the 2nd platform (959 articles) with a lot of trust
from customers. Promotions accounted for 24% of user positive discussions, with
Lazada leading with the most news (872 posts), followed by Shopee with 778 posts. In
2021, these platforms actively organized monthly sales campaigns on double dates
(1.1, 2.2, 12.12) or in big holidays (Tet, April 30, October 20, Christmas...) and focus
on promoting the use of images of KOLs2 with high visibility, great influence to
increase communication efficiency such as Hyun Bin, Ninh Duong Lan Ngoc,
Seventeen (Lazada), Coach Park Hang Seo, Van Thanh, Tien Linh (Shopee) and Ha
Anh Tuan (Tiki). In contrast, Sendo only uses the form of communication through
Fanpage with the image of Dai Sendo, combined with the Sendo Seller Community
Group (a place to exchange questions, share sales-related experiences, etc.). The
informed decisions are made based on these critical insights to create a high
performance of getting more customer.

In particular, Shopee is one of the largest e-commerce sites in Vietnam with an

extremely large number of users. Not only owning a large number of buyers, Shopee
also creates favorable conditions for countless stores to make sales on this platform.
With such a large scale, finding products of good quality, reasonable price and being
of great interest to many people is a top priority for both buyers and sellers. That is the
main reason leading to the birth of a tool called Shopee Sales Analytics. This is a
feature on the Shopee App and Seller Channel that allows you to get an overview of
2
Key Opinion Leader (KOL): it is also known as an "influencer". KOLs are a spokeperson, a brand ambassador, or a
thought leader.
your Shop's business. Using this sales analysis feature helps you find your strengths,
thereby developing your Shop's potential:

Shopee Analytics provides users with extremely useful features such as:
Use market data: This feature helps users analyze the best-selling products that are of
top interest to customers today. The analyzed data is taken from the products sold on
the Shopee e-commerce platform. Analyzing market trends will help sellers make
more accurate and effective product business decisions.
Industry Category Data: This feature helps to analyze the industry-wide market and
capture popular trends. With industry-wide analytical data, help users quickly and
accurately determine their choice.
Product data: Accurate analysis of data of product types, growth cycles, development
trends and reasons of hot products. As mention before, using the prehistorical
searching result that customers make, Shopee provide buyers with similar goods with
different price so that they can choose the reasonable price with the highest
satisfaction.
similiar goods

For example, if you just bought a T-shirt there will be a thousand of different choices
for you to choose with maybe relevant or exactly the same form but different in price
will appear. This is what Shopee or other E-commerce platforms use to boost their
revenue when making customer want to buy more because of the variety in goods.
Ranking data: This feature helps users to know the ranking trend of products and
where are the top keywords in the industry. Merchants can leverage the acquired data
to make product-related decisions and expand customer traffic.
Popular search data: This will be the feature that calculates the data of popular
search terms on the entire website and detects the traffic source of the product's hot
keywords. Help sellers can use hot search terms to post for sale or update their
products.
Store data: helps users to track store data and performance. This helps to gauge store
sales trends and growth trends. This will be useful data for sellers to increase sales
performance for their stalls.
When selling on the Shopee e-commerce platform, the use of support tools will bring
sellers a lot of advantages. Specifically, when there is useful data related to purchasing
trends and products, sellers can devise strategies to meet customer needs. The benefits
that the Shopee Analytics tool brings to sellers are as follows:
Analysis of best-selling products: Shopee Analytics helps to statistics and
summarizes the best-selling products on Shopee in the past 1 month. Then sellers on
Shopee can easily sort products by sales or number of products sold.
Statistics and analysis of competitors' booths: When doing business and selling on
e-commerce platforms like Shopee, it is essential to know the competitor's
information. To support that, Shopee Analytics allows sellers to view their
competitors' information for free. From there, your booth can offer reasonable product
business strategies, increasing competitiveness with competitors.
Keyword analysis: Shopee Analytics will assist sellers in analyzing the most
searched keywords on this sales platform. From the existing data, sellers can create
the right products with keywords with high search volume. This not only increases
your potential customer file, but also directly generates a large number of orders,
bringing significant profits.
This tool not only brings benefits to sales channels but also brings a lot of incentives
to customers such as:
Price history statistics analysis tool: Shopee Analytics is a tool to help customers
view historical price statistics of products every day. From there, it can help customers
make decisions whether to buy the product today or wait for a better price.
Growth, engagement, and revenue reports help you understand customer behaviors.
You can easily find out who interacted with your content and if they clicked, bought,
or downloaded something, so you can create content that resonates with them. This
gives you insight on the number of sessions at each stage of the funnel. Starting
from the visitors that only view your products, moving to those who add products
to their cart, how many initiated checkout, and lastly, how many sessions finish
with a transaction. This report gives you a clear picture of how visitors move down
the funnel and helps you identify what you can fix in the process to increase the
number of transactions. Customers stick to companies that treat them like people
and not like numbers. The ultimate goal of ecommerce analytics is gathering data
to understand customers and optimize products and processes to meet and exceed
customers’ expectations.  

Sales analytics tool

When you mention books, people will immediately think of the service they provide
for knowledge and soul care. Tiki began as an online book retailer, but since 2017, it
has broadened and diversified its offerings to become what it is today an online
trading platform. Tiki is a multi-industry online retailer with 9 core consumer goods
categories, and after 11 years of business operation, it has gained recognition among
consumers of all ages, particularly young consumers. Books continue to be a strong
"identity" commodity for Tiki. Due to its highly streamlined supply chain
management by professionals, Tiki has the lowest return rate and greatest customer
satisfaction among all e-commerce companies operating in Vietnam. from working
with well-known businesses that specialize in the provision of high-quality goods to
managing warehouses and logistics, accepting payments, and offering first-rate
customer support, we have the knowledge.
Vietnam's consumer shopping preferences have changed since 2010, when Tiki was
first formed. According to a Euromonitor analysis, up to 75% of survey participants
prefer to purchase online. Online shopping enables customers to save time, make
payments easily, compare costs and frequently buy more affordably, have things
delivered to their homes, and purchase goods whenever they want. Retail activity has
been influenced by this convenience, as well as demographic changes such as a
younger population, higher income levels, and increased Internet and mobile device
adoption. Online in Vietnam saw phenomenal growth, which enhanced the customer
experience. Tiki has implemented cross-device and in-app marketing solutions to
improve conversion efficiency between desktop and mobile.

This concept means there will be more people choose online payment instead of the
tradition payment. Therefore, Tiki would try to improve customer’s experience
through different kind of campaigns such as: use feedbacks of buyers to enhance the
services, decide which promotion does the platform need to make, and use the data to
better understand consumer behavior on a large scale and make smarter decision about
their marketing strategy.
The high application of technology products has helped e-commerce platforms to earn
high profits for the company. A typical example is the most popular e-commerce
platform in Southeast Asia, which is LAZADA, the uses large data sets (Big Data)
combined with analytical tools to help the commerce trading floor LAZADA has an
inside look at market trends so that it can effectively devise policies and campaigns to
attract customers. And the growth of e-commerce is partly reflected in the average
value spending of buyers.
It can be seen that the number of consumers has increased steadily over the years,
especially in 2019, despite the strong influence of the Covid-19 pandemic affecting

the economy, but in selling and purchasing digitally. Digitalization has increased the
number of consumers. Covid-19 has brought a negative impact on the economy but
also contributed to changing consumer behavior and that is also the potential for the
development of e-commerce. In 2020, the average person/year in Vietnam for online
shopping is $240 in 2020, an increase of more than 41% compared to 2016. The
percentage of people using the internet has increased steadily by 4-5% over the years,
it is also a contributing factor to the development of e-commerce platforms in general
and floor LAZADA in particular.
In addition, the average spend of online shoppers is rising. According to the data, the
percentage of consumers spending less than 1 million VND on goods decreased by
10% after only one year (2019-2020), while the percentage of consumers spending 1-3
million VND, 3 -5 million, and more than 5 million Dong increased dramatically. This
demonstrates that purchasing goods on e-commerce platforms is very reputable and
builds trust in customers, allowing them to spend more money on shopping online.
And, based on previous analysis results, they can forecast how much customers will
be willing to pay for goods on this platform in the future. When buying online, there
will be many problems that affect customers' buying behavior, so Lazada has surveyed
to be able to understand more about consumer criteria to improve customer
experience.
According to LAZADA data, the majority of users will be concerned with the quality
of websites and applications in order to have a better experience, and will then be

interested in promotions based on customer psychology. The desire to buy more is

more beneficial for them, and of course the price must be lower when compared to
buying offline, which is also the third customer criterion in online consumption. To
compete effectively, e-commerce platforms must offer appealing programs to thank
their customers as well as reasonable return policies to protect their customers'
consumption. There are always appealing programs, such as giving discount voucher
codes based on the time frame, linking your bank account to your Lazada wallet,...
especially not allowing customers to buy items online boringly Lazada also has a
shopping feature that combines entertainment and shopping, known as
(SHOPPERENTERTAINMENT)

There are unique activities in the app such as live broadcasts, games with rewards of
vouchers or coins, and the ability to directly discount money on orders. Not only does
shopper-entertainment benefit buyers, but it also allows sellers to interact with
potential customers and grow their business on Lazada space.
The big picture of data in E-commerce has brought to people a general view of what
those E-commerce platforms making use of data in providing insights. Nonetheless,
lack of security in keeping customers’ information could possibly be a challenge for
big data management. Big data undoubtedly gives e-commerce companies useful
insights, but it also presents a "privacy paradox" because users often exchange their
personal information for free apps, promotional offers, and social network incentives
while simultaneously wanting to protect their privacy. Big data also offers significant
security risks because users are absolutely ignorant of who is using their data and for
what purposes. If firms could address this matter, it would be a significant rise in
customers.
Overall, by utilizing the dynamics of people, processes, and technology to
transform data into insights for sound decision-making and solutions to business
problems, big data analytics increasingly adds value to e-commerce companies. To
gain a competitive advantage, this is a comprehensive procedure that deals with data,
sources, talents, and systems. Other big E-commerces such as Amazon, eBay have
already applied data to experience enormous growth via analyzing data. This article
introduced how E-commerce in Vietnam works and analyze data to obtain the
valuable insights, also presented what they do with different kinds of data in order to
get the most information for future trends.

References:
- Big data analytics in E-commerce: a systematic review and agenda for future
research. Springer Link. Article
- Big data E-commerce’s strategy. UT-LOGS. Article
- Vietnam E-commerce market report on Social media in 2021. Reputa.vn. Report
- Survey of online retail sites. GMO-Z.com RUNSYSTEM. Survey
- General report of Vietnam E-commerce. Lazada. Report
- Phan tich ban hang tren Shopee. Banhang.shopee.vn