Top 6 Ecommerce Business Intelligence Tools in 2022

What makes a good company a great one? At the start of the new decade, we can surely say that what makes leaders win is their ability to ask the right questions, process the answers, and act on them. That’s why BI tools became an indispensable part of many businesses, often regardless of their size and annual revenue.

According to the survey of 2,856 users, consultants, and vendors by Business Application Research Center, BI is still increasingly demanded in 2020, and multiple successful use cases of big data in ecommerce prove it. In particular, the most trending areas are master data and data quality management, data discovery and visualization, and establishing a data-driven culture.

Investing in data analytics, companies go beyond simple calculations of customer numbers, costs, and revenue. Instead, using algorithms and formulas, they gain a deep understanding of the underlying patterns, which results in predicting customers’ behavior and buying propensity.

Ecommerce is a kind of industry that vitally needs data analytics to find the answers. How effective is your advertisement? Do your customers reach their desired pages? Or does any element of navigation need to be improved? How price-sensitive are the customers? How responsive are they to your marketing campaigns? The abundance of customer information to process requires a thorough analytical approach powered with business intelligence tools.

But why employing a tool when the market is as rich in data experts as never before? Today, customers’ expectations are changing so fast one can barely trace them, and data processing, as well as data-driven decision making, appears to be a challenging task even for a team of in-house analysts. Analyzing your raw data, a BI tool saves time, reduces costs, contributes to decision making, as well as reveals opportunities you could have missed, and thus improves efficiency and unleashes the potential of your team. Moreover, a tool has an impersonal outlook on facts and can use them to make forecasts.

Today, the market is rich in business intelligence tools which can be used out of the box or as the basis for custom BI solutions, with many BI consultants specializing in ecommerce analytics. Besides, many BI tools that don’t address ecommerce in particular will still be a good fit for online businesses because of their simplicity and robustness of features.

Take a look at this guide to the ecommerce business intelligence tools worth looking at in 2020.

This is Microsoft’s take on how a BI and data visualization tool should look like. It is another regular leader of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platform, which contributes to the constant competition of Power BI vs Tableau.

Microsoft Power BI is a cloud-based solution, enabling users to analyze and visualize data with greater speed and efficiency. It works with content packs, pre-built dashboards, and many popular data service providers, which makes up for new easier ways of collecting data. Power BI can connect to various data sources on premises and in the cloud, and the data can be accessed from the web version and mobile app, or embedded into your system.

One of the biggest advantages of this product is the fact that it comes with a free desktop version. Of course, it has limitations such as the amount of associated storage, but given that it’s free, the smallest stores wouldn’t mind this restriction. While it’s more complicated to generate BI dashboards in Power BI than in many other tools on this list, they make up for it by being extremely robust—the amount of data visualizations in Power BI is extensive. Another advantage of the platform is its ability to collect data from real-time sources and perform instant analysis.

When a company’s BI needs outgrow the capabilities of the limited desktop version, it’s possible to turn to either of the two subscription-based editions. Both Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium offer more diversified BI features while enabling employees to play with larger data sets, manage user access to particular data, as well as collaborate on reports and turn them into interactive presentations.

It should be said that Power BI is also included in the ready-to-use collaboration suites—such as Office 365 and Microsoft 365. So, whenever an ecommerce business gets the E5-level subscription of either, they can leverage the Power BI features with no additional fees.

However, this tool is more complicated to operate than tools dominating the visualization game, such as Tableau, so be ready to ask for professional assistance when it comes to Power BI integration.

Power BI is a perfect platform for ecommerce businesses that either start out with analytics or are ready to switch to advanced BI tools. The best thing about it is that Microsoft provides a wide range of useful educational materials. They will help your developers to set up BI dashboards with Power BI.

The prices vary from the annual subscription for $9.99 per user monthly to $4,995 per cloud compute and storage resource, billed annually.

This tool is famous for its interactive dashboards. It allows you to track and analyze data almost in real time. It might be a bit more complicated than Tableau, but only because the drag-and-drop functionality is rudimentary and mostly serves as a design feature. With Chartio, users can collect data from the most popular data sources, cloud or SSH tunnel, and then build SQL-like queries within the interface (AND, OR, ANY, etc.) and visualize them in interactive dashboards. 

Apart from being one of the most accessible data visualization tools, it allows people with some basic SQL knowledge to build advanced dashboards and share them with colleagues. These dashboards can be used for further data exploration and performance tracking. This is BI democratization at its finest. 

Chartio has an extensive suite of available data sources that specifically target ecommerce businesses. For example, not many BI solutions can connect to Bing Ads, DoubleClick, Outbrain, and other exotic sources that are needed for an ecommerce business but will often be useless for other industries. 

Chartio provides different pricing plans, such as Startup that will cost you $40 per user per month, and Premium, that includes a number of additional features at a custom price.

This is another heavy-weight ecommerce business intelligence tool that offers unprecedented access to business information for any user with or without prior BI experience. 

Domo has a collection of more than 1,000 pre-built connectors to collect data from various cloud platforms, on-premises systems, flat files, or proprietary systems. Then the data can be transformed, normalized and visualized, so that users can get insights and make better decisions.

Updates, alerts, and reports generated by Domo are easy to share with coworkers. They become especially useful when you have a complex organization that spans multiple departments. This often eliminates the need to hold meetings and discuss performance because data is readily available to almost anybody.

One of the standout features of Domo is its Magic ETL, which is a set of tools that can help you generate data streams and present them in convenient formats. The suite is built around drag-and-drop functionality and can help you ‘grab’ data from anywhere and turn it into anything. 

For example, Salesforce data can easily be blended with data from an Excel spreadsheet. Another feature that may come in handy is the ability to build your own apps based on the platform or collaborate with Domo on custom apps using your data.

Domo provides incredible visibility into the entire ecommerce operational chain. For example, it has a suite of features designed specifically for supply chain management. The built-in predictive capability can point to specific seasonal trends and even provide supply chain predictions based on identified weather patterns. All this contributes to better operations, with no more stock-outs or unexpected demand spikes. 

Domo doesn’t have fixed pricing plans. Instead, they offer custom pricing plans that are determined on a case by case basis.