Maximize Retail Store Sales with Embedded Analytics
Introduction
The retail industry is a sea of opportunity for business-oriented people who want to own and run their own company. To maximize their success, retail business leaders use embedded analytics to improve their workflows so that they can better provide what is necessary for consumers, and in turn increase customer loyalty. This has been doubly true since the start of the pandemic, when many customers began encountering significant challenges in finding the quality products they need. Through embedded analytics powered by Bold BI, retail industry players can analyze their business performance and base their decision-making on hard evidence to better serve customers, increase their sales, achieve higher profits, and establish a symbiotic rapport between themselves and their customers.
In this blog, we will cover how embedded analytics enhances businesses in the retail industry through the following subtopics:
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of embedded analytics in the retail industry.
- Bold BI’s Retail Store Performance Dashboard example.
- How to embed analytical tools in retail domain apps.
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is the integration of analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. Applied to the retail industry, embedded analytics with Bold BI helps companies make predictions about future sales and product demand, leading to important business optimization through the insight gained from the data.
Benefits of embedded analytics in retail store performance
Embedded analytics has motivated the retail industry to implement different strategies to encourage business development. This section explores how embedded analytics has informed new approaches to running retails stores by enabling the following:
- Improved sales strategy.
- Efficient analysis and data integration.
- Predict future sales and increase profit.
- Improved decision-making.
Improved sales strategy
Embedded analytics helps track key metrics such as sales date, sales per square foot, net sales, sales volume by store, and more. With the analytical data set, retailers can investigate performance store by store and identify trends across all of them. Using this information, managers can set appropriate sales objectives, encourage specific modes of sale, and evaluate business finances. Clarifying the company’s sales revenue and financial expenditures with this data improves the retail stores’ success through proper management and sales objective achievements.
Efficient analysis and data integration
Embedded analytics helps organizations in the retail industry analyze and integrate their data for faster growth and development. By monitoring key metrics like average unit retail, average basket size, average basket value, and more, managers can study their data sets through easily understandable reports and dashboards that can be composed quickly and distributed seamlessly with an embedded analytics solution. From the insights gained, managers can develop new business structures toward outperforming competitors, motivating repeat customers, increasing delivery sales, and boosting total income.
Predict future sales and increase profit
Embedded analytics allows managers to track the most-consumed products in their stores. This helps them forecast future sales and capitalize on customers’ interests by highlighting areas where demand should be further cultivated. With this knowledge, managers can spearhead new targeted marketing strategies to encourage sales that outpace forecasted figures and as a result increase profit margins.
Improved decision-making
Embedded analytics helps managers understand the rate of goods bought and sold within their company. By analyzing metrics like conversion rate, inventory turnover, total visitors, decision-makers can pursue strategies that stimulate the growth of the business. With an embedded analytics solution in place, management can synthesize data into a simpler and easily understandable format. This helps retailers measure their performance in terms of profitability, sales, and returns on investment for products sold. In turn, knowing these things enables leaders to adjust different aspects of their business to improve performance across the board.
Retail Store Performance Dashboard
The Retail Store Performance Dashboard analyzes retail store sales using metrics such as sales date, total visitors, average basket value, and sales volume by store. It helps managers account for and audit the store’s sales flow.
Key metrics and KPIs
The following metrics are visualized in the dashboard:
- Sales per square feet.
- Average unit retail.
- Average basket size.
- Net sales.
- Total visitors.
- Average basket value.
- Sales and gross profit by category.
- Revenue table.
- Sales volume by store.
Sales per square feet
This number card shows the average revenue a retail business creates for every square foot of sales space.
Average unit retail
This number card shows the average price an item is sold for in a specific period. It is calculated by dividing net sales or total revenue by the number of items sold.
Average basket size
This number card shows the average number of items sold in a single purchase. It is calculated by the total units sold divided by the number of invoices.
Net sales
This KPI card shows the amount of sales after the deduction of returns, allowances, and discounts.
Total visitors
This doughnut chart breaks down the total visitors to the retail store by the number of buyers and the number of non-buyers. This helps managers understand customer behavior, helping them make better decisions to improve the business.
Average basket value
This line chart shows the average value spent per customer transaction in the store. It is calculated by dividing total sales by total transactions. This helps demystify the shopping habits of customers, providing insight on how much customers are willing to pay for items.
Sales and gross profit by category
This combo chart shows the product category’s sales volume and gross profit value. The gross profit is calculated in a company’s income statement by subtracting the cost of goods sold from the total sales.
Revenue table
This grid calculates the annual revenue for retail stores based on detailed information like net sales, cost of goods sold, gross profit, and gross profit margin. It helps managers compare revenue numbers between stores, allowing them to identify stores that could benefit from improvements.
Sales volume by store
This map shows the net sales of retail stores located in different cities. It helps predict the impact of selling fewer or greater units than expected during a specific reporting period. Sales volume by store is calculated by multiplying the number of units sold per month by 12.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Retail Store Performance Dashboard.
How to embed Bold BI analytical tools into retail domain apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into the retail industry. Bold BI helps you embed your dashboards in more than 18 web app platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, Vue with ASP.NET Core, and more. In the remainder of this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards into your Angular applications. Consider a scenario where your retail store has a website like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboards successfully.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server in your local machine and create a dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment steps here.
Step 1: Create an Angular application
To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, you first need to create an Angular application. Create a new Angular project in Visual Studio Code and add the necessary TS files to the project as shown in the following image.
For more guidance, refer to the sample code in the Bold BI documentation.
In this demonstration, the Angular application acts as a client, and an ASP.NET Core application acts as a server. You need to add several properties in the app.component.ts file as shown in the following table and screenshot.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. For example: http://localhost:5000/bi.SiteIdentifier : For the Bold BI, it should be something like “site/site1.” For the Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use “cloud.” If using Bold BI, you should use “enterprise.”User Email : The Bold BI server will use an email address to authorize the authorization server.
After adding these properties, we need to create the Bold BI instance.
Step 2: Create a Bold BI instance
After the Angular web application is created, you need to create a Bold BI instance to communicate between the server side (any web application) and the client side (Angular application), which allows us to embed a Bold BI dashboard in the Angular application.
Step 3: Create an authorization server to authenticate the Bold BI server
Every application that embeds a Bold BI dashboard or widget must be authorized with the Bold BI server. This authentication step requires sending confidential information to the Bold BI server, such as users’ email addresses, group data, and embed signature. So, in your server application, implement this authentication flow and provide the URL for connecting to your server in the Bold BI instance.
Step 4: Run the Angular application to view the embedded dashboard
In the Angular application, update the authorization URL and dashboard URL that were defined in the ASP.NET Core application. Finally, you can see that the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
By following the previous steps, you can embed your dashboard into your Angular application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your Angular applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.
Conclusion
Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will save you time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope you now have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help companies in the retail industry be more successful. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
To get started with Bold BI, start a free 15-day trial and begin creating interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on April 28, 2022.
