Analyzing Shopping via Social Channels

Omni-Channel Retailing evolved from multi-channel retailing, with a specific focus on a seamless approach to the consumer experience through all available shopping channels: mobile, computers, brick-and-mortar, social, television, radio, direct mail, catalog and so on. How retail stores integrate social & mobile technologies into the buying experience to close the gap between in-store transactions and online shopping will be crucial to their success. Social & Mobile are key in any multi-channel strategy for retailers.

Twitter is a great place for discovering product recommendations from brands, friends, experts and artists and is a natural fit for being another channel for retail. Twitter and Amazon.com have created a new social shopping feature, based around the hashtag #AmazonCart (#AmazonBasket for the UK). If you spot an Amazon product link on Twitter, you can now add it to your shopping cart just by responding to the tweet with the hashtag #AmazonCart.

It’s been a little over a month since it was announced and I was curious about its uptake and decided to do some analysis using Excel and PowerBI. To acquire the twitter data, I used a tool called Plus One Social that has pretty good Excel interface and template.

I configured the Excel template to connect to the Access database that Plus One Social uses for downloading the data. Plus One Social uses a PowerPivot tabular model for the data and the template comes with prebuilt relationships:

Looking at the Data it looks like there has been significant activity over the last few days:

 The US hashtag #AmazonCart has seen significantly more usage than #AmazonBasket but there seems to be one day where #AmazonBasket spiked over #AmazonCart. Drilling down it into the data, I see that its Jun 20, 2014. Drilling into the messages itself, it turns out that it was the day Amazon posted a promoted tweet with #AmazonBasket, so I’ll treat that as an outlier. The hashtags associated with AmazonBasket and AmazonCart give an indication of what’s popular in the UK and the US. Here is a view of the popular hashtags for the UK:

Drilling down into the messages associated with the hastags, its apparent that Kindle books seem popular, as also xbox and PS4. The Hashtags associated with AmazonCart (and hence the US) look like this:

Further analysis of the data would provide a lot of insights. Try downloading Plus One Social from https://plusonesocial.com/ and visualize the results using PowerBI.