Web analytics applications, opportunities and challenges to online retail in India

Abstract

Indian e-commerce industry offers a very competitive marketplace to the retailers. However, with the enormous competition, online retailers need to understand and track the consumer behaviour on their website to generate profits. With the multi-channel growth of online retail, it has become very much critical to analyse these behaviours and correspondingly plan their operations. Web analytics has offered a number of tracking and analysis opportunities to the retailers, rather than just creating a sense from huge amounts of periodic batch data. The insight that they gain from such analyses is then used to direct, optimise, and automate their decision making to successfully achieve their organisational goals. Present work discusses the different categories of web analytics, along with their implementation and management perspectives. Web analytics strategy implementation process has been outlined along with the commonly used web analytics tools. A comparative analysis of the popular web analytics tools has been presented to indicate the specific choices. Also, the present day challenges and opportunities have been presented for the Indian retail market place.