Make Commerce Great Again

For the next few weeks, I'm going to talk a bit about what a healthy business looks like. 

Between my Diagnostics projects and my Merchandise Forensics projects, I have data points for about 100 e-commerce, retail, and catalog brands over the past three years alone. Good data points - one row for every item a customer purchased for the past five years. In a typical year, I analyze about 500,000,000 rows of customer purchase transactions ... about 5,000,000,000 rows since founding MineThatData.

Not Google-sized data of course ... but more transactions than your favorite vendor or trade journalist analyze within a Diagnostics / Merchandise Forensics framework.

So I know a little something about what a healthy business looks like.

If we want to Make Commerce Great Again, we're going to have to get away from our myopic focus on campaigns. You cannot understand how ants behave by studying individual ants. Similarly, you cannot understand how customers behave by studying individual campaign performance.

Tomorrow, we'll begin talking about healthy businesses. If the series goes well, I'll assemble a booklet based on the topic.