Management Project Proposal

On

Application of Big Data in Retail

Submitted to: Submitted by:

Dr. Preeti Sharma Rajan Sharma

Assistant Professor 16A1HP112
Project title Applications of Big Data in retail

Description

The project focuses on the opportunities and possibilities arising from Big Data in retailing,
particularly along five major data dimensions - data pertaining to customers, products, time,
location and channel. Much of the increase in data quality and application possibilities comes
from a mix of new data sources, a smart application of statistical tools and domain knowledge
combined with theoretical insights. The importance of theory in guiding any systematic
search for answers to retailing questions, as well as for streamlining analysis remains
undiminished, even as the role of Big Data and predictive analytics in retailing is set to rise in
importance, aided by newer sources of data and large-scale correlational techniques. The
Statistical issues discussed include a focus on the relevance and uses of Bayesian analysis
techniques, predictive analytics using big data and a field experiment, all in a retailing
context. Finally, the ethical and privacy issues that may arise from the use of big data in
retailing are also highlighted.

Introduction

The volume, variety, and velocity of data being produced in all areas of the retail industry is
growing exponentially, creating both challenges and opportunities for those diligently
analysing this data to gain a competitive advantage. Although retailers have been using data
analytics to generate business intelligence for years, the extreme composition of todays data
necessitates innovative approaches and tools. This is because the retail industry has entered
the big data era, having access to more information that can be used to create amazing
shopping experiences and forge tighter connections between customers, brands, and retailers.
A trail of data follows products as they are manufactured, shipped, stocked, advertised,
purchased, consumed, and talked about by consumers all of which can help forward
thinking retailers increase sales and operations performance. This requires an end-to-end
retail analytics solution capable of analysing Large datasets populated by retail systems and
sensors, enterprise resource planning, inventory control, social media, and other sources.
Objective

The prime objective of this research of big data on retail industry is to provide a 360-degree
overview of the customer in an e-commerce as clickstream data and monitoring online
behaviour can help optimize e-commerce sites. Without the assistance of big data, the sheer
volume of clickstream data would be difficult to analyse. And retailers can incorporate other
metrics such as social media shares, purchase history, and more to improve performance for
e-commerce websites.

Methodology

As it is not easy to track the customer record across the websites, so the idea is to do web
scrapping and web crawling to get both qualitative and quantitative data because both things
are equally important to determine the consumer behaviour and there buying patterns.
Thus the only method to collect data is web crawling and scrapping using Python.
The fetched data that will be in .csv format will then be analysed in excel.
The sample size is undefined because its Big Data so data would not have any limit.
Some of the statistical techniques that will be used here is :
1. PCA
2. Regression
3. Market basked analysis

Managerial Contribution
In this growing economy data plays a significant role in day to day life. A manager can do
descriptive and predictive analysis and implement these for the following:
-Improve store layout
-Order management
-Measure brand sentiment
-Demand-aware
-Optimising Business Processes
-Understand the target customer
Limitations
1. Time constrain
2. Fetching data is difficult
3. Handling large data
4. Fetching important information
5. User-level results cannot be presented directly
6. User data is not suited for producing learnings

Reference

1. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-for-retail/
2. https://data-flair.training/blogs/big-data-in-retail-industry-real-world-uses-examples/
3. http://arunkottolli.blogspot.in/2014/03/defining-business-objectives-for-big.html
4. https://retail.franchiseindia.com/article/technology/back-end/Interpreting-Big-
Data.a3035/
5. https://www.dezyre.com/article/5-big-data-and-hadoop-use-cases-in-retail-
analytics/91
6. http://www.synergicpartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/451-Research-Big-
Data-Report.pdf
7. https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&
uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwi8qpr1_tTXAhXDpo8KHSESC7kQFgg9MAM&url=http%3
A%2F%2Fec.europa.eu%2Finformation_society%2Fnewsroom%2Fcf%2Fdae%2Fdo
cument.cfm%3Fdoc_id%3D6243&usg=AOvVaw0mpMeWpb5fz7bLXXZr7AI8
8. https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/reports/data-
insights-peer-research-report.pdf
9. http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/big-data/big-data-retail-2398957.pdf
10. https://insidebigdata.com/2015/09/30/the-future-of-big-data-and-retail-with-case-
studies/
11. https://www.simplilearn.com/big-data-transforming-retail-industry-article
12. https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-scrape-websites-with-python-and-
beautifulsoup-5946935d93fe
13. https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2017/07/web-scraping-in-python-using-
scrapy/
14. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-scrape-web-pages-with-
beautiful-soup-and-python-3