Speaking at a session on E-commerce analytics at Exchange4Media’s Pitch Analytics in Action conference, Ashok Banerjee, VP (Engineering and Supply Chain) at Flipkart said that analytics helps the companies in making trade-offs and offer a better service to customers. He said that segmentation of customers is key for e-commerce companies and companies should segment their customers through various parameters like category, gender, region, seasonality and the current trend. However, he also pointed out that Analytics can only be an enabler in decision making and is usually unpredictable, unlike operations. Company's Phase of Life: Banerjee said that a company is in a specific phase in the phase of life at any point. These include Word of Mouth, Offline marketing and susceptibility to positive and negative news. He noted that companies can expect exponential traffic while in the word of mouth phase, while traffic from offline marketing is usually a step function with a sharp decay. However, he also pointed out that not all products will receive marketing via word of mouth. For instance, people will share a fancy wrist watch they bought but they will never speak about what undergarments they bought. He also said that companies are susceptible to positive and negative news depending on the product. For instance, even if 1 million people say a specific baby product is fantastic and only one says his child lost an arm, users will probably not buy the product while in the case of a chewing gum, people will probably buy the…
