#Big Data in Retail

[techtoio]

The Impact of Big Data Analytics on Business Decisions

Introduction

Big data analytics has transformed the way of doing business, deciding, and strategizing for future actions. One can harness vast reams of data to extract insights that were otherwise unimaginable for increasing the efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall profitability of a venture. We steer into an in-depth view of how big data analytics is equipping business decisions, its benefits, and some future trends shaping up in this dynamic field in this article. Read to continue

[truetechreview]

How DeepSeek AI Revolutionizes Data Analysis

1. Introduction: The Data Analysis Crisis and AI’s Role2. What Is DeepSeek AI?3. Key Features of DeepSeek AI for Data Analysis4. How DeepSeek AI Outperforms Traditional Tools5. Real-World Applications Across Industries6. Step-by-Step: Implementing DeepSeek AI in Your Workflow7. FAQs About DeepSeek AI8. Conclusion 1. Introduction: The Data Analysis Crisis and AI’s Role Businesses today generate…

[hanasatoblogs]

The Role of Big Data and Predictive Analytics in Retailing

In the world of retail, understanding customer behavior, optimizing inventory, and predicting future trends are critical to staying competitive. Big data and predictive analytics have emerged as powerful tools that enable retailers to gather insights, make data-driven decisions, and enhance the customer experience. This article explores the role of big data and predictive analytics in retailing, examining how they transform operations, improve sales, and offer personalized experiences for customers.

What is Big Data and Predictive Analytics in Retailing?

Big Data refers to the massive volume of structured and unstructured data that retailers generate from various sources, including sales transactions, social media interactions, customer reviews, and website activity. It is characterized by its volume, variety, and velocity.

Predictive Analytics uses statistical algorithms, machine learning techniques, and data mining to analyze historical data and predict future outcomes. In retail, predictive analytics helps retailers forecast trends, customer behaviors, and sales, enabling them to make informed decisions.

Together, big data and predictive analytics allow retailers to gather insights from a wide array of data sources, analyze patterns, and predict what customers will want next. This can lead to better-targeted marketing, optimized inventory management, and improved customer satisfaction.

Key Benefits of Big Data and Predictive Analytics in Retailing

1. Enhanced Customer Experience and Personalization

One of the primary advantages of big data in retail is its ability to provide a more personalized shopping experience for customers. By analyzing customer data—such as browsing history, past purchases, and interactions with products—retailers can offer targeted recommendations and personalized promotions.

How Predictive Analytics Helps:

Tailored Recommendations: Retailers can suggest products that are more likely to appeal to customers based on their preferences and past behavior.

Targeted Marketing: Predictive analytics can help create highly targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with individual customers, improving conversion rates and customer loyalty.

Real-World Example: Amazon is a prime example of personalized retailing. The company uses big data to analyze customers' browsing and purchase history, offering personalized product recommendations that contribute to a significant portion of its sales.

2. Optimizing Inventory Management

Effective inventory management is crucial in retail to avoid overstocking or understocking. Big data enables retailers to predict demand trends more accurately, helping them optimize their inventory levels.

How Predictive Analytics Helps:

Demand Forecasting: By analyzing historical sales data, predictive analytics can forecast future demand for products, helping retailers stock the right amount at the right time.

Reduced Overstock and Stockouts: Predictive models can help retailers balance inventory to prevent overstocking, which leads to clearance sales, and stockouts, which result in lost sales.

Real-World Example: Walmart uses predictive analytics to optimize its inventory management. By analyzing customer purchase behavior and weather patterns, Walmart can predict demand for products and ensure shelves are stocked with the right items at the right time.

3. Improved Pricing Strategies

Pricing is one of the most important factors that influence customer purchase decisions. Retailers can leverage big data and predictive analytics to set optimal prices that maximize profit while remaining competitive in the market.

How Predictive Analytics Helps:

Dynamic Pricing: Predictive analytics can help retailers adjust prices in real time based on demand fluctuations, competitor prices, and market conditions.

Price Optimization: By analyzing historical data, retailers can identify the best price points for different products, improving sales and profitability.

Real-World Example: Airlines and hotel chains often use dynamic pricing, adjusting prices based on demand, time of booking, and competitor pricing. Similarly, retail giants like Target and Best Buy use predictive analytics to adjust prices based on demand forecasting and competitor pricing strategies.

4. Customer Segmentation and Targeting

Big data allows retailers to segment customers based on their behavior, preferences, demographics, and purchasing history. Predictive analytics then helps retailers predict how different customer segments will behave, enabling more effective targeting.

How Predictive Analytics Helps:

Identifying Customer Segments: Predictive models can segment customers based on factors like buying frequency, preferences, and demographics.

Effective Campaigns: By understanding the behavior of different customer segments, retailers can design tailored marketing campaigns that resonate with specific audiences.

Real-World Example: Target uses predictive analytics to segment its customer base and tailor marketing efforts. For example, the company was able to predict a woman’s pregnancy before she herself knew, enabling them to send highly relevant offers for baby products.

5. Fraud Detection and Risk Management

Big data and predictive analytics are also valuable tools for fraud detection and risk management in retail. By analyzing transaction data, retailers can identify patterns that may indicate fraudulent activity and take immediate action.

How Predictive Analytics Helps:

Anomaly Detection: Predictive models can detect unusual patterns in transactions, such as sudden high-value purchases or purchases from unusual locations, which may indicate fraudulent activity.

Risk Scoring: Predictive analytics can assign a risk score to each transaction, helping retailers take preemptive action before potential fraud occurs.

Real-World Example: Financial institutions and retailers, like PayPal, use predictive analytics to detect fraud by analyzing customer behavior patterns and flagging transactions that deviate from typical buying habits.

People Also Ask

1. How does big data improve retail inventory management?

Big data enhances retail inventory management by providing insights into demand patterns, allowing retailers to forecast future demand more accurately. Predictive analytics helps ensure the right amount of inventory is stocked, minimizing the risk of overstocking or stockouts.

2. What role does predictive analytics play in customer segmentation?

Predictive analytics helps retailers segment customers based on their buying behavior, preferences, and demographics. By analyzing these segments, retailers can create more targeted and personalized marketing campaigns that increase engagement and conversion rates.

3. How does big data contribute to personalized marketing in retail?

Big data enables retailers to track customer interactions and preferences across various touchpoints. With this information, predictive analytics helps create personalized product recommendations, offers, and targeted marketing campaigns, improving customer engagement and sales.

Conclusion: The Future of Big Data and Predictive Analytics in Retail

Big data and predictive analytics are revolutionizing the retail industry by providing deeper insights into customer behavior, optimizing inventory management, improving pricing strategies, and enhancing fraud detection. Retailers who harness the power of these technologies can create more personalized customer experiences, streamline their operations, and ultimately improve profitability. As the technology continues to evolve, we can expect even more sophisticated applications of big data and predictive analytics in retail, further shaping the future of the industry.

By leveraging these tools, retailers can stay competitive, anticipate market trends, and meet customer expectations in a rapidly changing environment. The future of retailing lies in data-driven decision-making, and big data, combined with predictive analytics, will be at the forefront of this transformation.

[pier-carlo-universe]

Milano, 10 marzo 2025 – Si è tenuto presso Terrazza Palestro a Milano l’evento "Business & Data Orchestration nel panorama retail", organizzato da Exelab in collaborazione con HubSpot. L’incontro ha evidenziato il ruolo cruciale della gestione strategica dei dati per migliorare la customer experience, con focus su due aziende di successo: Manifattura Valcismon e DentalPro.

[dhirajmarketresearch]

[silverpeople]

India's leading recruiting firm, offering comprehensive human resource recruitment consulting for all hiring headhunting requirements including leadership senior level hiring in a FAT manner

[curlyburp]

[IMAGE ID: A series of Threads (I think? or Bluesky or Twitter, not sure tbh) from user arosenfield2016:

Boycotts. I've worked corporate retail for twenty years. It's literally my job to know how and why consumers spend. ONE DAY WON'T MEAN SHIT. Stop buying EVERYTHING except essentials. Until further notice. If you're serious about making companies pay attention, long term action is the only way.

Delete all of your retail apps. Unsubscribe from all emails. Go to the actual site and leave site reviews telling them exactly what you're doing and why. Every company tracks NPS scores, consumer sentiment, to direct future plans. Email customer service. Daily.

Fill your carts and abandon them. But don't fill with crazy high ticket ones. Fill with what you would normally purchase. High ticket items they'll ignore as flukes/bots. People whose shopping data they already have, who fill and abandon, they'll pay more attention to.

Not everyone can boycott places like Walmart, I know, I grew up in a super rural area. Research brands they carry that are the lesser of all evils if nothing else and buy those. The big brands will lose market share. They HATE to lose market share. They'll scramble to figure out why and where it's going.

Seeing the impact will take time. Its earnings call season for most retailers who ended their fiscal years on 1/31. We won't see their Q1 2025 results until May. HOLD THE LINE. //END IMAGE ID]

[lensnure]

E-commerce data scraping provides detailed information on market dynamics, prevailing patterns, pricing data, competitors’ practices, and challenges.

Scrape E-commerce data such as products, pricing, deals and offers, customer reviews, ratings, text, links, seller details, images, and more. Avail of the E-commerce data from any dynamic website and get an edge in the competitive market. Boost Your Business Growth, increase revenue, and improve your efficiency with Lensnure's custom e-commerce web scraping services.

We have a team of highly qualified and experienced professionals in web data scraping.

[kitipan-blog]

Customer Data:  Do you really know them?

Recently, I’ve been working with a leading retail company in Thailand. What I’ve discovered were 3 things. Customer segmentation – even with numerous data including social data, transaction data and customer loyalty data, the CRM team still can’t clearly identify which segmentation this customer is. In practice, they have a big group (segment) of customer which customer can fall into one or more…

[mi-researchreports]

The Big Data Analytics in Retail Market is expected to reach USD 5.26 billion in 2023 and grow at a CAGR of 21.20% to reach USD 13.76 billion by 2028. SAP SE, Oracle Corporation, IBM Corporation, Hitachi Vantara Corporation, Qlik Technologies Inc. are the major companies.

[objectsol07]

Where Functionality Meets Aesthetics: Expert Web Development at Your Service.

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[b0tster]

Working on arcade mode functionality some more for today's Nightmare Kart dev post as the launch party in brooklyn approaches!

Today I added a 'leaderboard edit' screen to modify, add, and delete entries for various reasons (potential data loss being a big one). This edit screen can only be accessed outside of arcade mode, meaning that normal players cant access this screen.

It's also worth noting that arcade mode will be accessible in the retail version of the game as part of the DLC update!

[randomitemdrop]

you've posted a few ai generated images as items lately, and i'm wondering if that's intentional or not?

Short answer: no, it wasn't. Aside from a few I made when the generators first became publicly available and all the images were gooey messes, they've all been reader-submitted, although I'll admit I didn't catch the snail-boots. Personally I think AI image generators are a more nuanced situation than a lot of opinions I've seen on Tumblr, but given that they can be used so evilly, I'm steering away from them, if only to avoid the Wrath of the Disk Horse.

Long answer, and this is just my take, if you want to really get into it you'll have a much more interesting conversation with the people with devoted AI art blogs instead of me occasionally sharing things people submit:

There have been some major cases of unethical uses for it, but I think it's important to remember why AI image generators are such an issue; data scraping and regurgitating uncredited indie art is bad, but in the case of the snail-boots, it was just a fusion of one dataset of "product photos of boots" and another of "nature photos of snails", which I would say is not depriving anyone of credit or recognition for their work (MAYBE photographers, if you're a professional nature photographer or really attached to a picture you took of a snail one time?) I get the potential misuses of it, but when Photoshop made it easy to manipulate photos, the response was "hmm let's try and use this ethically" instead of "let's ban photo editing software". Like, I'd feel pretty unethical prompting it with "[character name] as illustrated by [Tumblr illustrator desperate for commissions]" or even "[character name] in DeviantArt style", but I'd have a hard time feeling bad for prompting with "product photo of a Transformer toy that turns into the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile". I know there's the question of "normalizing" the services but I think that overestimates how much the techbros running these things care about how everyday consumers use their free products, preferring to put their effort towards convincing companies to hire them to generate images for them, and in that case they respond way better to "here are some ways to change your product so that I would be willing to use it" than to "I will never use your product". For example here's one I just made of "the holy relic department at Big Lots", fusing corporate retail photos and museum storage rooms.

TL/DR: on the one hand I understand the hate that AI gets and it's not something I'm planning on using for any of my creative projects, but on the other hand I think it's overly simplistic to say it's inherently bad and should never be used ever. On the third hand, I really hate participating in arguments over complex ethical philosophy, so I'm just gonna steer clear entirely.

[dhirajmarketresearch]