International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research Volume 10, Issue 4, April-2019 588 ISSN 2229-5518 IJSER © 2019 http://www.ijser.org Strategic Data Driven Approach to Improve Conversion Rates and Sales Performance of E-Commerce Websites Hussain Saleem 1 *, M. Khawaja Shaiq Uddin 1 , Syed Habib-ur-Rehman 1 , Samina Saleem 2 , Ali Muhammad Aslam 3 Abstract— E-commerce is a buzzword to actually describe the electronic commerce trade activities happening between business and customers including but not limited to online shopping, digital payments, and online trading between businesses. In today’s digital age, e- commerce has been playing a very important role in areas such as retail, sales automation, and payment services. With huge amounts of data been collected from different e-commerce services available, there are multiple opportunities to use this data to analyze trends and strategize profitable activities. This paper explains the strategic data-driven approach for the improvement of business sales performance and conversion rates of e-commerce websites. This is a modern approach to collect key data metrics and implement cost-effective automation that helps in improving conversion rates and sales performance leading to increased profitability and revenue for business and high satisfaction of customer service. The business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B) models are explored where issues and challenges like handling logistics and distributions, payment security issues, warehouse management, and reasons to lower sales conversion rate are described. Where suggestive methods to improve conversions and sales by means of performing web-tests, retaining buyers, checkout process optimization, and approaches to increase user trust is discussed. Index Terms— conversion rates, digital payments, e-commerce, online shopping, retail, sales automation. ——————————  —————————— 1 INTRODUCTION s online shopping is increasingly becoming a part of our daily lives – both personally and professionally, it is also pushing businesses to collect more useful data to understand their customers in order to come up with products that meet their requirements. Usually, third-party analytics applications are an immediate tool to collect such user data in real-time. This collected information such as traffic sources, visitor country, and average time spent on site etc. can be further used to understand audience and model visitors’ behaviour and buying patterns. However, few key metrics such as the real-time user activity, abandoned cart rates, and the sequence of the actions performed by these website visitors are usually not considered. Therefore, implementing advanced tools such as heat maps, pixel tracking, and a view of the real- time user session can be of great interest to understand more complex buying patterns [1]. One of the popular e-commerce giants and China’s largest e- commerce company, Alibaba Groups Inc., is consistently developing and implementing sophisticated data mining algorithms and retail automation processes that will not only help them in analyzing bulks of data sets collected from different pages of their website but it will also help them to dramatically grow the business [2] [3]. Another e-commerce giant, Amazon Inc. has estimated that 90% of all the data generated by mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones etc. are never analyzed. In fact, Amazon also states that around 60% of this mobile data starts losing its value within milliseconds of being generated [1] [4] [5] [6]. 2 DISCUSSION 2.1 How E-Commerce is different from retail? Unlike the traditional brick and mortar retail stores, an e-commerce business model is simply an online retail channel where a customer can order a product or a number of products from a merchant via a web-based portal that is identified as an e-commerce website or simply an online store. This e-commerce website uses an integrated or a linked payment processing service that allows the customer to seamlessly pay online through his credit card or an internet wallet service [3]. The e-commerce model can be further classified into many categories but the two most popular and effective among business and consumer groups are (1) Business-to-Consumer (B2C), and (2) Business-to-Business. Fig.1 has illustrated these two most effective categories. 2.1.1 Business-to-Consumer (B2C) Business-to-Consumer e-commerce model can be a retail store selling groceries online to its consumers and it can also be an independent fashion brand selling merchandise to its consumers directly via their e-commerce website. Irrespective of the product been sold, the B2C e-commerce model revolves around the idea of selling directly to the end consumers without the interference of any middle man. For example, Amazon is one of the oldest and the most popular B2C e-commerce marketplaces in the world [4]. Similarly, daraz.pk is one of the biggest e-commerce websites in Pakistan that had been recently acquired by the Chinese giant Alibaba Group Inc. [7]. A ________________________________ 1 Department of Computer Science, UBIT, University of Karachi, Pakistan. 2 Karachi University Business School, KUBS, University of Karachi, Pakistan. 3 Institute of Business Management, IoBM, Karachi, Pakistan. *Corresponding Author: hussainsaleem@uok.edu.pk IJSER