Integration of Business Intelligence with e-commerce

The growth of online shopping has allowed e-commerce to become a usual concept. However, companies still have little knowledge about their customers and the most appropriate and effective processes to create a perfect fit between costumers' needs and companies' interests. To solve this problem, it is important to join e-commerce with Business Intelligence (BI). This paper provides a survey of the most popular business intelligence and e-commerce open source platforms and proposes an architecture to combine e-commerce with business intelligence. We study Pentaho and SpagoBI business intelligence platforms and Magento and OpenCart e-commerce platforms. An integration model of e-commerce and BI platforms is also proposed using an API and communication mechanisms.

I. Introduction

E-commerce plays a major role in boosting companies increasing customer base, improving communication with customers, increasing revenue growth, and reducing costs [1]. Nevertheless, companies still have little knowledge about their customers. Business Intelligence (BI) comprehends the strategies and technologies used by companies for the data analysis, providing historical, current and predictive views of business information. BI facilitates the transformation of raw data into knowledge, to support better business decision-making. Common features of BI platforms include reporting, online analytical processing, data mining, benchmarking, text mining, predictive and prescriptive analytics. Therefore, business intelligence would enable to obtain knowledge about e-commerce platforms' customers, allowing the analysis of behaviors, finding purchasing patterns, improving customer relationship management, better stock management, and competitive advantage over its competitors.