Data-Driven E-Commerce: Modernize Retail Experiences with Amplitude

Not too long ago, retailers with physical stores considered their online presence as an addition to their business. In many instances, one didn’t know about the other. And that created a problem for customers who expected to have a seamless experience between shopping from their home and pushing a cart through a store. This inconsistent customer experience has forced an evolution in retail that requires a holistic approach.

Complex relationships

Today, customers expect retailers to understand them and provide personalized experiences, whether they are shopping in-store or from the comfort of their home. They expect a consistent and personalized shopping experience regardless of the channel. Understanding the intricate customer paths and their interactive touchpoints is essential. By connecting business data with customer insights, retailers can tailor campaigns, increase engagement through personalized recommendations, and facilitate the path to loyalty sign-ups and subscriptions, thereby augmenting long-term customer value and retention.

Figure 1: Modern Digital E-Commerce Journey

Navigating the modern digital journey in e-commerce involves understanding the complex paths customers take from discovery to purchase, as shown in Figure 1 above. At every touchpoint and interaction whether it involves a page view, swipe, click, store visit or customer support call, your customers create new data about who they are, what they are doing, and what their intentions are. This customer behavior data, when combined with existing proprietary data, can provide valuable insights to improve customer journey and drive growth.

So, how can today’s retailer manage modern digital journeys and understand how to meet customer needs and wants where and when they happen?

Enter Amplitude, an AWS Partner, that has a powerful Digital Analytics Platform which helps retailers automatically stitch together behaviors across devices and sessions into real-time customer profiles to derive insights and take actions. The platform enables retailers to unlock insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends. By leveraging Amplitude’s digital analytics platform for customer behavior analytics and AWS to access deep business insights from the warehouse, retailers can gain a comprehensive view of their customers. This holistic approach allows for the identification of patterns and trends that might not be apparent through traditional analysis methods.

We will review three use cases that demonstrate immediate value retailers can gain by using Amplitude and AWS.

Use case 1: Curbing cart abandonment

Amplitude’s analytics on AWS provides a solution for one of the most significant challenges faced by retailers: reducing cart abandonment.

Consider a retailer who is facing a significant rate of cart abandonment. By analyzing both qualitative and quantitative insights through Amplitude, the retailer can identify why customers are not completing the purchases after adding items to the cart. This gives marketers an opportunity to execute omni-channel campaigns aimed at re-engaging customers who abandoned their carts. This involves exporting these customer groups to Amazon S3 bucket enriching them with internal proprietary data and targeting them through various channels to regain their interest and prompt them to complete their purchases.

Since these customer groups are dynamic and updated in real-time, retailers can orchestrate customer journeys based on business specific events and triggers in the digital interface. By initiating these win-back campaigns, retailers can assess the effectiveness of re-engaging customers with attractive offers, with the outcomes seamlessly recorded back within Amplitude analytics.

Use Case 2: Driving repeat purchases

Repeat purchases is an important metric for retailers and are important to the long-term growth of the brand. To drive repeat purchases, retailers implement strategies to enhance customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty. These strategies include implementing loyalty programs, offering personalized recommendations based on prior purchases, providing customer service to build trust and loyalty, sending targeted promotions, and extending discounts to existing customers while maintaining a seamless and convenient shopping experience both online and offline.

To elaborate, consider a scenario where a retailer wants to discover why customers do not return within a 30-day period. By leveraging Amplitude’s self-serve insights to uncover patterns that provide insights, the retailer can launch a new loyalty program, offering perks like free shipping and bonus shopping tiers to bring these customers back. Amplitude’s native experimentation feature is used to plan, execute, and analyze various A/B strategies to optimize campaigns, drive better results and ultimately, achieve marketing objectives more effectively.

Use Case 3: Increasing Average Order Value (AOV)

Average Order Value is a key metric that tracks the average purchase amount spent each time a customer places an order. By focusing on increasing AOV, retailers can drive revenue growth, improve profitability, and enhance customer relationships.

Consider a scenario where a retailer plans to launch a campaign to target loyal customers with an intention to grow AOV. Retailers can use the prior purchasing patterns and preferences of these customers to develop predictive machine learning recommenders. These models can help recommend supplementary purchases from a curated list of items tailored specifically to each customer. This approach can enhance basket size and overall conversion rates. Amplitude’s recommendation feature is used to create and deliver one-to-one personalized recommendations to customers, driving maximum incremental lift.

Build better digital product and experiences with Amplitude and AWS

Amplitude has been working with AWS to help brands identify consumer pain points, optimize user flows, and personalize experiences to better meet customer needs and preferences by understanding how customers interact with their products or services. Amplitude also enables A/B testing and experimentation which allows retailers to test different strategies and iterate on improvements to enhance the overall customer experience.

Reference architecture

In this reference architecture, shown below, we highlight how AWS customers can use Amplitude’s platform to create retail use cases like those highlighted in the use cases discussed earlier.

Figure 2: Personalized customer journeys with Amplitude and AWS

Let’s review how retailers can ingest and analyze customer behavior data into Amplitude’s platform and augment these insights with their own proprietary data to improve customer journeys. Here are the steps, progressing from left-to-right in the diagram:

1. Retailers can use various data ingestion methods to bring customer’s behavioral data into Amplitude’s platform. Amplitude SDKs and APIs are used to collect customer interaction data from various platforms like web, mobile, or over-the-top (OTT). Amazon Kinesis ingests streaming data in real-time and acts as a conduit, taking in raw interaction data from SDKs and APIs. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is used for batch ingestion of data.

2. Once the data is ingested into Amplitude’s Digital Analytics platform, the retailer can identify patterns and trends by analyzing customers interaction and behavior. Several other offerings of Amplitude can be used to solve specific use cases.

a. Analytics: Analyzes customer behavior data to provide insights into usage patterns, conversion rates, etc.
b. Audiences: Segment customers based on their behavior, which is leveraged for targeted marketing and personalization.
c. Experiment: Run A/B tests to optimize the customer experience and improve conversion metrics.
d. Governance, data management, connections: Tools for data management, mapping user pathways through the retail platform and integrating with other services.

3. Retailers can bring these insights into their AWS account using Amplitude’s out of box connectors for Amazon S3 or Amazon Redshift. This enriches each customer’s behavior with other internal proprietary data to facilitate capturing additional insights for tailored targeting.

4. Export the enriched customer data and insights from the AWS account to Amplitude for building audience segments.

5. Activate these audience segments by executing tailored campaigns based on specific use cases.

How Mercado Libre improved conversion rates with Amplitude

Mercado Libre, an e-commerce solution provider in Latin America with more than 200 million registered users across 19 countries, improved overall user experience and online conversions by leveraging Amplitude Analytics. They faced challenges with conversion and user experience within their applications. With the help of Amplitude, they learned that certain versions of their mobile app did not allow users to move freely when registering a credit card. By leveraging Amplitude’s platform, they were able to get a holistic view of users by bringing together real-time behavioral and transactional data to uncover valuable insights. As a result, cart abandonment was reduced by 9 percent and checkout conversion rate improved by 12 percent. This resulted in overall increase of 15 percent in monthly revenue.

Conclusion

E-Commerce has rapidly transformed and reshaped how businesses interact with consumers. The combination of real-time data processing, sophisticated analytics, targeted audience segmentation, and A/B testing provided by Amplitude, along with AWS’s powerful storage and advanced AI/ML capabilities, creates a cohesive solution. This enables every digital interaction to be captured, analyzed, and transformed into actionable insights. These insights then inform strategies to curb cart abandonment, drive repeat purchases, and increase AOV effectively. The benefits of leveraging Amplitude and AWS for retail analytics include a deeper understanding of every customer’s behavior, the ability to personalize every step of the customer journey and deliver impactful growth to the business.

About Amplitude

Amplitude is a powerful product analytics platform that enables you to build better products by tracking and understanding user behavior. With Amplitude, you can track user data and gain insights into user engagement, retention, and revenue. Amplitude keeps your data trustworthy and secure, ensuring that you have access to accurate and reliable information. Amplitude offers powerful analytics tools that help answer questions about what happened, why it happened, and which actions to take next. With Amplitude, you can seamlessly share your work across teams, facilitating collaboration and driving growth.

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