However, this type of information is neither available in public settings nor on job descriptions. Most likely, during one of your interview rounds, you will be asked to analyze a problem particular to the company's domain. If you are familiar with the domain beforehand, it would be an advantage. In this article, I will introduce a few roles that analytics plays in the eCommerce industry.

Let’s talk about the industry first!

E-Commerce is a rapidly changing business, owing to its underlying ever-changing technology. Amazon, E-bay are examples of organizations that employ real-time predictive algorithms on large data sets. I just said three huge words, and when they're put together, they create something unrivaled in the E-Commerce sector.:

1. E-commerce businesses have come a long way in terms of their decision making processes. In the early days, they would only use simple basket analysis to make recommendations. Today, they have customer specific predictive algorithms that are executed regularly.
2. Secondly, recommendation systems that used to take days can now be completed in seconds, which makes them more efficient.
3. Lastly, tabular data stored in CSV formats is no longer the norm. To manage millions of activities from billions of customers, we need to parallelize processes. E-Commerce industries do this seamlessly and the customer never even notices.

Role of Analytics in E-Commerce

Ecommerce Analytics are an important aspect of risk analysis and marketing planning if you have worked in the financial sector. E-Commerce, on the other hand, is much broader than this. The major responsibility of E-Commerce firms is to create a delightful user experience on their website. They're simply a platform connecting sellers with consumers. Analytics has become a product that creates user experience, rather than being something that only businesses use. For example, the recommender engine on Amazon's sidebar is a great example of how analytics can be used to create products . Now you can see how much broader role analytics plays in the eCommerce industry. In the next section, we will discuss how analytics is being used for various broad functions.

Functions supported by Analytics in E-Commerce Industry

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it will give you a good overview of the different roles in the eCommerce industry.

1. Supply Chain Management : Data management is a huge component of being an E-Commerce buyer, and includes everything from managing data for items all the way to the customer. Analytics are used extensively in e-commerce businesses to manage inventory. Additionally, optimizing delivery transportation and pricing is a major portion of the job.

2. Merchant/Customer Fraud Detection : FB showed a post where someone found out that he was given a show instead of the MAC computer he ordered which costed 90,000 rupees. This is called fraud and even though the E-Commerce company might not have anything to do with it, they are usually the ones who pay for it in some way or another. Frauds don't always come from businesses either--customers can make false claims too as part of a scam. These were all originally done by people, but now predictive algorithms are being developed to try and avoid them if possible.

3. Recommender Systems :When I think of recommender engines, the first thing that comes to mind is YouTube. However, these systems in the e-commerce industry aren't too different. Just like on YouTube, they provide customers with a way to navigate through an online store and find what they're looking for.Recommender engines are one of the most significant contributions of analytics to technology.

4. Product specific analytics : The team of experts working on product-specific elements, such as a product's satisfaction rate or sales forecast. Their work covered numerous verticals and was specific to a family of products or a single product.

5. Online Marketing Analytics : They must advertise on the virtual environment heavily since E-Commerce provides you with a virtual world in which to purchase items. Online marketing personnel are generally involved in purchasing online advertisements on Google or other websites. They analyze the funnel of new prospect consumers and boost the probability that they will click an ad by maximizing potential leads along the way through conversion optimization.

6. User Experience Analytics : Analytics will play a significant role in E-Commerce businesses. Customer focus is essential since moving from Amazon to Flipkart is so simple. The task of this team is mostly focused on designing the appropriate website architecture. This will cover how products are searched across the portfolio, what determines product ranking ordering for a given search, and what is the best landing page for customers arriving from Facebook, among other things . They also evaluate which type of design works better for different types of consumers.