WebSphere Commerce provides the following powerful tools that can be used individually or together to perform business intelligence and analytics:
- WebSphere Commerce Analyzer: For more information see WebSphere Commerce Analyzer.
- IBM Tivoli Web Site Analyzer: For more information see Tivoli Web Site Analyzer.
- IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner for Data: For more information see Data mining.
Business intelligence and analytics refers to the consolidation and analysis of data collected in the day-to-day operation of a business, which is then used as a basis for better business decisions and competitive advantage. Components include reporting, data mining and closed loop analytics.
For example, you may use business intelligence and analytics to analyze customer and order information to determine the relationship between customers and the average order value. If you determine return customers have higher order values, you can implement a marketing campaign to target these customers.
Reporting
Reporting organizes information from the data in a meaningful way. You can produce reports from data collected by both WebSphere Commerce Analyzer and Tivoli Web Site Analyzer using WebSphere Commerce Accelerator or a third-party reporting tool. Reports display data based on the result of an SQL query. For example, a report may answer the question "What are the top 10 products sold?".
Data mining
Data mining attempts to find interesting and relevant patterns about customers and their behavior by analyzing information from the WebSphere Commerce database. This data is not directly related to the result of an SQL query, but is based on a trend in the data. For example, data mining may find that customers from North America are more likely to abandon shopping carts.
If you choose to install DB2 Intelligent Miner for Data, you will be able to use the data mining processes included with WebSphere Commerce Analyzer to apply a collection of mining models to the WebSphere Commerce Analyzer data mart.
Closed loop
Business intelligence captures a wealth of information about the customers that visit, and more importantly, what they purchase from your site. Knowing your customers based on this information is important as it allows you to make more intelligent decisions about the marketing and merchandising efforts you undertake. For instance, based on the knowledge of who is buying a certain product, you might decide that it is worthwhile to try to up-sell some accessory to those people that have already purchased the product. You might also decide to create an e-mail activity advertising this product to customers that have not yet purchased the product. In both cases, targeting the new marketing message is relatively simple, as a result of the given purchase conditions. The problem is that there are probably numerous purchasing trends that exist among your customers that are not as readily apparent.
The process of creating merchandising and marketing materials, customers shopping the site with these new materials, collecting data, and then feeding this information back into the future marketing and merchandising efforts creates a loop.
Closed loop business intelligence brings the power of data mining to WebSphere Commerce using WebSphere Commerce Analyzer. This feature performs analysis on your operational data on a regular basis and suggests target customer segments based on results of the data. While the data mining results themselves require the skills of a qualified Database Analyst, the creation of the new customer segments is facilitated by the inclusion of a new user interface page in the Customer Segment wizard.
You must install DB2 Intelligent Miner for Data to take advantage of the closed loop processes provided with WebSphere Commerce Analyzer and WebSphere Commerce, which include creating customer segments based on the data mining results.