Trading intelligence blog

The march to real-time trading

Published July 01, 2010

Technology’s impact on physical retail has been evolutionary, but its impact on ecommerce is likely to be more dramatic. Ecommerce is not the same as physical retail – it needs to be managed differently and as it becomes a larger part of every retailers’ growth plans it will require fundamental changes to their whole business.  There is an almost unfathomable amount of data created online, increasingly in 'real-time' including web analytics data, marketing data, operations data, competitor data, price and availability data... the list goes on.  Indeed there is so much data that it can be overwhelming. But being able to analyse it, draw insights and take actions is critical to a successful retailer.

Looking at how ecommerce responds to low sales illustrates how different this new retailing world really is.  In physical retailing, when a product doesn’t sell, the default solution is to cut prices.  In online retailing you know exactly how many customers are actually looking at your products, so can quickly determine whether the issue is lack of people looking at it, or lack of interest in the product despite people looking at it.

As retailers scale, the value of managing in real-time outweighs the cost.  It is an economic inevitability that retailers will be compelled to start trading daily, hourly and – in due course - real-time. Understanding the importance of real-time trading and embracing its value will be the most decisive factor in establishing which retailers thrive and which struggle to survive as competition increases.

A longer version of this article appears in eCommera's recent Trading Intelligence Quarterly report. You can download a copy here.