Physical stores always had to limit their services to the regions around the shop. With the advent of E-commerce, the whole world has become your playground!!

Geopolitical borders no more restrict businesses from expanding their customer base. This huge potential of the E-commerce industry can be harnessed to derive insights that could give the business edge over its competitors.

How does Geographic Analysis help businesses?

Understanding where the customers reside, which regions are the most profitable, and how the product preference varies with the region can help in future planning. For instance, the marketing costs vary from state to state. As a result, the region that generates maximum revenue may not be the one that is the most profitable. This calls for a reassessment of the marketing budget to ensure it is utilized effectively.

Product preferences of customers may also vary with region. Climate, cultural values, ethnicity can all be reasons behind this. Understanding the region-based customer preference is vital for inventory management. This information can also help while launching new products.

The average order value in some states may be higher than in others. This could be linked to the household income and the population of the region. The insights drawn from AOV comparisons can help the business in developing its pricing strategies.

This dashboard tries to analyze the performance of the business region-wise. It tries to understand how the sales, returns, customers, AOV and product preferences vary across regions. The dashboard has three tabs:

  • Summary Overview - This dashboard gives an overview of how the basic sales KPIs vary across regions.

  • Detailed Analysis – A detailed region-wise analysis is made in this dashboard, including the product purchase trend across these regions.

  • Refunds and Returns – This dashboard talks about how the return and refund trend varies across regions.

The dashboard helps the business in achieving the below goals:

  • Assess the efficiency of the current system

  • Understand Sales trend across regions

  • Plan region-based marketing and pricing strategies

  • Capture the product purchase trend across regions

  • Assess the customer satisfaction

Key Terms :

  • Average Order Value or AOV is the amount of money spent by each customer per transaction. If the customers have more items or more expensive items in their cart, AOV increases.

  • Average Basket Size or ABS measures the number of items sold (quantity of items purchased) per transaction. It supplements AOV by providing the reason behind its increase or decrease.

Goals Questions to ask Dashboard views
Understand Sales trend across regions How do sales vary across different states/regions?

Which city contributes to maximum revenue?		 Sales distributed geographically, Sales summary, Regional split, Top 10 cities by sale
Plan marketing and pricing strategies How is the Average Order value changing across states?

How is the quantity of items purchased per transaction varying with time?		 Order summary
Capture the product purchase trend Which are the top revenue-generating products in the east? Top 10 products by sale
Assess the customer satisfaction

Assess the efficiency of the entire process		 Which states have returned maximum orders?

How is the refund percentage varying across states?		 Refund sales state-wise

Returned orders

  • Capturing the sales and product purchase trend across regions gives insights for designing the product and pricing strategies.

  • Average Order Value drives key business decisions like product pricing, marketing expenses, etc. The increase or decrease in AOV can be explained by the Average Basket Size, giving a complete picture for the decision-makers.

  • ABS combined with AOV could also explain the effect of promotional strategies on sales. For instance, if both AOV and ABS increase during a clearance sale, it shows that customers bought items in large quantities due to the sale.

  • Identifying the top 10 revenue-generating cities is important for further planning. The strategies that worked in these regions can be reused in other parts which have a similar sociocultural background.

  • When the refund/ return rate from a particular region is very high, it may indicate an issue in handling orders. The high refund rate can be due to old/inferior quality of the products, delay in delivery, or bad handling of the shipping package. The business might need to focus more on this region.

Conclusion

The insights from the dashboard would help in planning region-wise product, pricing and marketing strategies. It could also help in assessing the customer satisfaction and efficiency of the existing process.