DECEMBER 2023retailtechinsights.com9And in most of the conferences I go to, I feel like this is being forgotten. In an article, it is said that in the US, there are 687k e-commerce companies in the US with some revenue. And only 30k of those make >1M sales. So we can say that most of us work in medium or small e-commerce. This also means that most of us work in e-commerce and digital teams in sizes between 10-50, probably. In such a size, we need to optimize our tests and our experiments instead of testing everything and collecting all data, even when extremely complicated. In this article, I will try to underline the importance of the intelligence of humans around data, which is one of my favourite topics. Today we get data from everywhere, we know potentially everything, and partly because of this, we fall into the data-driven chimera.The data-driven chimera, I call it like this, is the idea, based on phantasy and on tech news interpreted by not tech-logics people, that we just need to collect data, and then everything will be cool.Therefore, often we totally forget, in these small or middle businesses, to focus first on what we could actually do if we had the data. I'm not hiding that one of those who inspire me is Avinash Kaushik and his blog ­ I suggest you visit his pages as next read. What he is doing is something simple but rare (in the world of marketers) ­ he uses intelligence.From one of his articles, I loved the idea of `Out-of-sights' instead of `insights'. This shortly means stop collecting insights about everything and start thinking of what you've missed until now, compared to the others. Two Recurrent DreamsGetting to the real stuff here, there are two dreams many people have in e-commerce businesses. Having All Customer Data to Make Endless Segments for All: the idea of creating a segment for every type of user/customer to exponentially boost revenue and create xx automated strategies. The idea is not wrong; if you know your customer well, you can do business out of it. Just in the end, those guys discover that they have no specific strategies or products to use for the newly identified segments. Example: a luxury brand selling women's lingerie, average basket 250. If the company is on the market, everybody in it should already know more or less the buyer persona (otherwise, they would have closed already). If, after collecting all data, after spending a lot of money and resources on this, they'll discover that they also have a small segment of men not willing to buy anything, one small segment of young women with not enough money, one small of people coming to the website from 10k km away, and one of the old women over 60 dreaming of younger days, will they change something about their strategy? Are they interested in addressing a totally different segment? In most of the companies of, small and middle size, the answer is no. Better alternative? Except if you're a specific company able to totally change product catalogue very fast, focus on what you have already and to whom you could sell it in a specific way, then look for this segment, and not the other way round. A/B Testing Is Magic, Data Wins, Do It Everywhere: putting resources on continuous A/B testing of micro-details, forgetting the big picture. HR resources and tools to achieve small CR growth are expensive things. A/B testing, as a child of `data-chimera', also sounds like magic. After a very long work (1 year?), on many different tested points, you'll get maybe (best case) a +0.01pt CR. Depending on your business, it can be enough or not to create an ROI. Think of how many things you have missed whilst working on that small 0.01pt. Better alternative? Focus on facts before testing everything, and test after having found the opportunities. Try to go the other way round, find something (a page) where you're probably achieving a CR, which could be higher, looking at competitors, and then focus on that page or element. Where are you losing your purchasers? A bad address form? Missing payment methods? The risk of testing everything without strategy is that at the end of the test, you'll discover that your product was simply 5$ too expensive. ESCAPING FROM THE DATA-DRIVEN CHIMERAThe data-driven chimera, I call it like this, is the idea, based on phantasy and on tech news interpreted by not tech-logics people, that we just need to collect data and then everything will be cool
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