Data Visualization in Retail - Transforming Data Into Business Value

by Tech Trendz Writer

Data in various forms is generated whenever someone uses any digital product or service. It is omnipresent and pervasive, but data alone is not enough for businesses and organizations to make decisions and drive business forward. Data visualization plays an essential role in presenting data to the stakeholders in ways that make it easier to understand the trends and make informed decisions.

What Is Data Visualization?

Data visualization represents data in graphical formats such as charts, plots, infographics, heat maps, bubble clouds, scatter plots, mekko charts, and animation. These visual displays and portrayals of data streams help communicate complex data relationships in easy-to-understand visuals, which can be used to make informed decisions. Data visualization aims to identify patterns and trends from large data sets.

As per Harvard Business Review, data visualization can be categorized into four parts: idea generation, illustration, visual discovery, and everyday data visualization. This enables and helps evaluate and assess complex data streams in graphical form.

Data visualization can be a powerful tool for retail businesses to communicate insights, trends, and opportunities compellingly for various stakeholders. Interactive charts and stunning visuals that include dashboards and reports using services of data visualization it can enable retail organizations to leverage data to make informed decisions.

This blog showcases how data visualization can impact retail businesses with dynamic and interactive visual displays of various metrics and indicators for tracking progress and monitoring business performance.

How Does Data Visualization Impact Retail Companies?

Accessing real-time data: Data visualization models allow retail businesses to use multiple and disparate systems to consolidate data that can be presented in easy-to-use graphical formats. The stakeholders do not need to review the raw data or separate data sheets from various departments to manage the overall business. The tools for data visualization and BI help consolidate data from multiple departments and display the required data to be displayed on dashboard. The dashboard is updated routinely based on the data streamed into the database.

Forecasting patterns in customer demand: Customer demand fluctuates and can cause variation in giving recommendations and personalizing offers. Data visualization tools help glean detailed insights into customer behavior and retail operations by leveraging data streams. The accumulated data is processed using data analytics, and data visualization offers these analyzed numbers on the visual dashboards and other visual references to help make informed decisions.

Promotional activity and optimization: For many retail businesses, sales pick up during the promotional offerings. To offer the right mix of products and prices, retailers need to visualize the data during each phase: pre-promotional, promotional period, and post-promotional. Data visualization dashboards can be used to understand precisely how the promotional campaign is progressing and make accurate time adjustments.

Online cart analysis: Today’s digital and online business makes it critical for retailers to understand what makes customers add, remove, or discard items in the shopping cart, essentially understanding the shopping cart behavior of customers. Data visualization dashboards and other visual reports enable retailers to analyze customer shopping patterns. These visual analytics would allow retailers to design campaigns to push items customers want to add to their shopping carts.

Inventory tracking: It is possible to generate forecasts for the movement of products to various stores and warehouses, including giving shipment status updates using BI tools and data visualization. This can be achieved using inactive model relationships of data and fact tables that combine data visualization techniques. This process enables data to be filtered by various variables and categories such as product, region, customer, item movement, shipping costs, warehouses etc. Dashboard views showing real-time analytics allow supply teams to track the inventory levels and material movement across purchase and sales departments.

Report customization: Data visualization allows users to modify and customize reports in appearance and functionality per their preferences and requirements. It processes raw data and generates models based on analytics to deliver visual insights.

Cost reduction: By using data visualization, businesses develop a more informed supply chain strategy to understand and respond to customer requirements better and faster. It enables reducing customer complaints and the costs attached to resolving such issues. Data visualization enables space utilization and optimization that can reduce inventory while giving complete visibility across warehouses, manufacturing plants etc. This allows businesses to minimize obsolete stock and eliminate wastage with accurate forecasting.

Conclusion

Data visualization or visual storytelling enables access to accurate and complex information at a glance. It can help develop innovative products and empower the workforce to make informed decisions. It helps turn complex multi-format data into user-friendly visuals that are easy to understand and interpret by all the stakeholders within the company.