Use Consumer Behavior Data to Optimize Your Marketplace

Consumer Behavior Data Guide Priorities

Consumer behavior is about how customers shop within the marketplace.

The eMarketplace platform is a conduit for collecting, analyzing, and transferring consumer behavior data in an aggregated form. This is key to determining cyclic trends of consumer behavior.

Behavioral data determines what matters when it comes to service, support, and governance, and provide a mechanism for sellers to improve.

Consumer behavior data guide the action points for these aspects in the marketplace.

Consumer Trends Reveal What’s Important for Products

If people start buying lower cost items with lower reviews in a particular category, they’re basically saying they’re not as concerned about quality for those products.

This influences sellers to focus more on commoditization or having different offerings with a lower cost.

One way to do that is to have offerings with different lifetime expectations, such that one product will last a long time and be the premier product, while the other won’t last as long and be a cheaper version, based on the materials it’s made out of.

Another consumer behavior you might see is a trend towards different features or capabilities within a niche or category. These features can become a requirement to get a reasonable amount of sales in that category.

This type of trend happens in the technology industry. A particular amount of RAM for a computer is a minimum. If a seller doesn’t have a least a certain number of RAM for the machine, or a certain number of CPU cores, for example, then people aren’t even going to consider that machine.

In addition to analyzing consumer purchasing decisions, it’s important to look at the data for what people search for, click on, add to their carts, and their dwell time on a page or how long it takes to add something to their cart once they find it, and if they move things out of the cart after finding something else.

All these aspects are part of consumer behavior data, and it’s important to analyze each of these factors properly, preferably using AI or machine learning.

Use Consumer Behavior Data to Know When Trends Occur

You can also use data on consumer trends to inform your marketing strategy.

Half the story is what they’re purchasing, and the other half is when they’re purchasing it.

Certain products fly off the virtual or physical shelves at certain times of the year, so you can use this data to time things like promotions and advertisements.

This is the concept of cyclicality, or recurring trends of consumer purchasing decisions in the marketplace.

Logistics are also affected by consumer behavior data. At certain times of the year, people are willing to pay more to get items faster. In this case, speed and shipping are prioritized over cost, and perhaps over some product features as well.

Therefore, you can use this data to optimize the timing of specific factors for when they’d be the most profitable. This will help you be more competitive and generate greater revenue.

With consumer behavior data analysis, you can determine if a particular marketplace has become commoditized, and you can communicate that to sellers within the marketplace.

This is hugely beneficial to sellers and ultimately to buyers because sellers will have the right information about what consumers want and they can more precisely target their inventory, pricing, and logistics offerings. Sellers can focus their energy on improving those key aspects that matter to customers.

Predict Outcomes and Adjust to Changes

It’s also important to analyze not just trends in your marketplace, but also trends in the general market and overall economy, and seeing how this impacts your marketplace.

There are sometimes noncyclical events or novel trends that occur where there’s more purchasing of certain things, and there might be other factors involved as well, and all of this strips supply capability.

Therefore, to be able to fulfill orders, it’s crucial that sellers have a good understanding of how to forecast, or estimate what kind of demand they’re going to get.

In the event they purchase too much inventory, sellers need to know how to evaluate cost reduction and do promotions. This will allow them to deplete that inventory without having a huge loss on it.

This is a balancing act of operating as a seller, manufacturer, or distributor. The marketplace helps by informing the seller and providing data analytics on consumer behavior.

In other words, the eMarketplace platform is a conduit of information that brings macro data from trends in buyer behavior to the sellers.

This is what enables sellers to adjust accordingly and your marketplace to flourish.

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