This article explores the benefits of analytics, the differences between transactional and analytical data, and how Marketplacer can help operators access their data for analysis.
Running a successful marketplace involves monitoring the performance of sellers, products, categories, brands, and promotions through various metrics. Analytics helps to track these metrics and make data-driven decisions.
Basic analytics are usually provided as part of most Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms, while more advanced analytics are produced through dedicated analytics and Business Intelligence tools outside of the marketplace or e-commerce platform.
Types of data
Transactional data (OLTP) and analytical data (OLAP) differ in purpose, structure, usage, and storage.
Transactional data is used to manage day-to-day operations and processes, while analytical data is used for analysis and decision-making.
Examples of transactional data from Marketplacer include extracting the All Adverts or the All Sales reports as CSV files.
Analytical data is usually aggregated and summarized from transactional data and may include external data sources. Analytical data requires data warehousing and processes to extract and transform data which can be very expensive and time consuming.
Use cases for accessing analytical data
Once you have the marketplace data that you need, you may encounter the following common use cases.
Custom Analysis
Marketplace operators often need to create reporting and analytics that are specific to their business, including detailed seller/product metrics, analytics on custom fields and more.
As many operators use customized solutions and utilize Marketplacer in a non-standard way, it is difficult for Marketplacer to perform deep analytics. It’s therefore important to allow you to access your marketplace data to allow you to perform your own analysis.
Data Augmentation
You may want to combine your marketplace data with other datasets that are only accessible to you in other platforms. This includes behavioral data from your e-commerce engine, 1st party product performance, other public datasets and more.
Data Sharing
You may want to provide data to 3rd parties where it is not possible to do so via Marketplacer. For example, providing campaign data to a marketing agency.
Is my data ready for analysis?
Data needs to be in a suitable format, accessible, complete, and accurate for it to be ready for analysis. This means that data must be well-organized, structured, and cleaned for easy understanding and use for analysis.
Data should also be in a consistent format, with no missing or duplicated values. In addition, the data should be stored in a location that is easily accessible to analysts who need it. This may involve using data warehousing or data lakes to store and manage large volumes of data.
Marketplacer has partnered with Snowflake to provide you with access to ready to go analytical data and a greater range of analytical capability.
Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing and analytics platform that allows organizations to store, manage, and analyze large volumes of structured and semi-structured data in real time.
Marketplacer has configured the pipeline and data transformation process to make your marketplace data ready for analysis within Snowflake. This makes it easier for you to access and manipulate data to gain valuable insights for your marketplace.