June, 20208 IN MY V EWBY KLEMEN DROLE, CIO, LAZADA GROUPE-COMMERCE AND THE DATA BEHIND ITE-commerce as a concept is straightforward enough. Aisles and aisles of physical products, now easily accessible digitally at a click of a button. But the digitization of shopping has opened the flood gates to turbulent competition.New concepts give raise to new entrants who can expand much faster as they don't need to build a large physical footprint. Sure, us within E-commerce can battle, perhaps engagein discount wars, dropping product prices to lure the ever-fickle customer back and forth. But, the past has shown that `trust', if gained, creates a far better and everlasting draw with a customer.Within the paradigm of E-commerce, `trust' aka `brand value' is created through consistent customer and seller experience. Both are multi-dimensional, and are comprised of how the platform is perceived in terms of ease of use, relevance and consistent delivery of products and services. Data sits at the core,enabling the platform to scale, providing the base for the millions of algorithmic decisions taken by the platform every second.The use cases of such data can vary from understanding and communicating the expected delivery time of a package, to showing customersproducts they are likely to buy. To start, raw data, the lowest denomination in the data world, must be captured, synthesized, and then fed to algorithms and/or human decision makers. These processed data points provide a foundation on which we build and continuously improve customer and seller experience and processes.Scaling with DataWith scale, E-commerce's need and capability around data must involve. Disparate structured and unstructured data sources, and large volumes of it, must over time be unified, reachingtowards a single source of truth. A second important consideration is the velocity at which data is processed and utilized. E-commerce firms often must evolve to become less reliant on manual checks and balances, moving towards near real-time systems to verify orders and their respective buyers and sellers. Such a feat requires both strategic thinking and infrastructure investment.
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