Many companies operating in the eCommerce, Retail, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Digital Marketing industries collect large amounts of data about customers at different touch points across the so-called consumer journey. Data analytics provides a powerful means to gain customer insights, but their effectiveness depends on the data they are fed with. Data collected by individual companies often provide a partial view on the customer journey and the analytical models often neglect factors that have an important impact on customers’ decisions. EW-Shopp aims at supporting companies to gain deeper customer insights by helping them develop analytical services that use rich models, which also consider events that impact on customer decisions, such as weather, marketing campaigns, holidays, etc.. The main project objective is to develop a toolkit to facilitate all the data processing steps required to develop reliable weather and event-based data-driven services, including data preparation and enrichment, analytics, and visualization. In addition, the project aims at demonstrating the effectiveness of weather and event-based data analytics for developing valuable business services and the usefulness of the delivered toolkit.
The EW-Shopp toolkit has been released as a set of open source interoperable components, which can be reused even beyond the scope of project. SIx business services based on analytical models that use data about events and weather have been developed by companies in the project consortium and made available for their business units and clients. Different tools have been used in the development of the different business services, which has helped testing the components of the toolkit also on data of large size compared to the kind of analytics developed in these domains.
