This article originally appeared on CXO Today.

In today’s competitive market, every eCommerce business needs a competitive edge to thrive. Many companies are discovering that unifying their data is key to gaining this advantage. While data and analytics hold immense potential for driving eCommerce growth and profitability, many companies in India find it challenging to use these tools effectively.

By adopting a unified data strategy, businesses can create a powerful differentiator. Understanding your business, customers, and products creates a comprehensive picture, all driven by data. Every industry today relies on data to deliver products faster, better, and cheaper!

To meet customers where they are, brands must be present across multiple channels and platforms, meticulously tracking every click, scroll, and purchase. These digital footprints are crucial for sustaining growth and profitability.

However, an omnichannel marketing strategy often results in fragmented analysis and insights. The challenge with such a strategy is that sellers often need to log in to various marketplaces and marketing platforms (Meta, Google, etc.), making the process time-consuming and taxing.

Additionally, because these channels report metrics differently, the data is not readily available for analysis. And this is why data unification is the need of the hour. It’s the process of consolidating data from multiple channels and sources like online store, transactional, inventory, and marketing data into a single platform that can provide a holistic view of the business and empower teams to function strategically.

Every eCommerce brand generates massive amounts of data in its daily operations of countering and optimizing Facebook and Amazon algorithms. With such high volumes, there is also a diverse variety of data points, and the speed with which these are generated and change (velocity), along with their value, become crucial markers that need to be understood.

Each dollar spent matters, and as a result, more than ever, businesses need to be able to access valuable insights in real time. However, manual data unification processes are plagued by challenges that make real-time analysis nearly impossible.

Relying on spreadsheets or clunky reporting systems not only demands significant time and effort but also introduces a high risk of manual errors. These errors can have cascading effects, leading to inaccurate insights and flawed decision-making. Moreover, the data from different sources is often structured differently and reported with varying metric definitions, creating a heterogeneous data set that requires substantial cleaning effort. The labor-intensive process of manual data consolidation means that by the time the data is ready for analysis, it may no longer reflect the current market situation, making the insights obsolete. As eCommerce operations are highly dynamic, this lag can harm strategic decision-making.

Managing rich data sets can be complex. This is where AI-driven analytics platforms come in. By leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, these platforms circumvent many of the challenges associated with manual data unification processes. They can ingest data in real-time, harmonize disparate metric reporting methodologies across channels, and prepare data for analysis without tedious format conversions. Importantly, AI-based systems minimize the risk of human errors that often plague manual efforts. These platforms also consolidate data from numerous sales channels, eliminating the need for sellers to log in to each one individually.

Beyond directly addressing data unification hurdles, AI analytics platforms also negate the requirement for dedicated teams focused solely on data consolidation tasks. They facilitate real-time analysis, which ensures insights remain relevant to evolving market conditions. Perhaps most crucially, these systems maintain data integrity by mitigating errors and instilling confidence in the analysis, empowering brands to make well-informed strategic decisions.

When done correctly and consistently, data unification can drive three key advantages in the current market: data democratization (making complex data sets accessible to teams across the brand, ensuring each does their bit to work towards growth), informed decision-making, boosting efficiency and productivity by removing data silos and agile marketing by empowering leaders to make changes to any campaign or initiative on the fly.

For example, brands can create in-depth customer profiles by combining data from various customer touchpoints, such as website visits, purchases, and customer interactions (wishlist, missing size/stock notifications).

Based on these, marketing can become more targeted, which will lead to more sales and repeat visits. Think of personalized recommendations and campaigns that help customers feel understood and valued. Amidst the complexity of eCommerce, having a clear, unified view of data is essential for brands to make confident strategic decisions.

Gaining a panoramic view of customers interacting across websites, mobile apps, marketplaces, and social media channels will ensure your decisions align with market and customer trends. Additionally, when brands have a unified view of their operations, they can optimize stock levels and reduce the risk of stock-outs, without which they can lose customers to similar competing brands.

With such helpful insights, supply chain and logistic partners can better collaborate and equip eCommerce brands to ensure customers do not have to wait in dissatisfaction for products they love, along with reduced lead times, warehouse costs, and minimal RTO-related expenses.

With AI technologies growing rapidly for custom industries, they are able to forecast market trends with a precision that’s unmatched by anything before, and if brands tap into this, they can not only predict future demand but also instantly know and optimize areas of improvement.

A centralized data repository will strengthen a brand’s competitive advantage, as decision-makers are no longer haphazardly pulling reports to make poorly planned expansion and marketing activities.

As eCommerce operations continue to evolve, data unification becomes critical to incorporate and harness; tools with AI-powered growth engines or predictive AI capabilities are the key to providing the brand with a singular view to make data backed business decisions in real time.

Authored By Prem Bhatia, Co-Founder and CEO, of Graas.