Customer information has never been more important to eCommerce operations than it is right now. With many merchants looking to improve efficiency, that means pruning out the items that don't sell and finding products that are immediately popular with their target audience, and data plays an important role in that process. That minimizes the chance of financial failure while simultaneously improving the shopping experience by improving  product offerings.

However, gaining insight into the mind of your customers can be challenging. A decade ago, metrics such as page views, traffic, conversion rates and click-through rates may have been all you needed to make informed decisions about the popularity of certain products. However, in a multi-device, multichannel shopping environment, you need to look at all possible avenues and consolidate this information into a single customer profile.

Multichannel buying experiences
The journey of an average shopper could start with them reading your retail email newsletter on their smartphones at work, before going in-store to make a purchase and discovering it's out of stock, then going online when they get home to make the final purchase.

If you don't consolidate all your customer data, it may look like one person saw an email and clicked a page but didn't convert while another just randomly went to your website and made a purchase.

The inability to create a multichannel customer profile makes it difficult to not only gauge the success of your different promotional efforts but also complicates your efforts to better reach individual customers and understand their needs.

"Know your shoppers," Practical eCommerce contributor Feras Alhlou explains. "They come from a variety of traffic sources on many devices, from laptops, home and work computers, to tablets, smartphones, and offline as well. Not only are shoppers using each of these digital devices, they are likely using them simultaneously. Look around your own household, for example, and you'll likely see someone surfing the Internet on their laptop with their cell phone sitting next to them texting someone, while watching TV."

By creating a singular user ID, you can start to gain some real insight into not only what they buy, but how they buy and how they interact with your brand. By having a complete picture, you can market t patrons more successfully as well as create relevant product bundles and offers. ECommerce software, such as SalesWarp, can help you consolidate all of this information to deliver an omnichannel shopping experience. Click on the link to learn more about SalesWarp’s multichannel retailing capabilities.