Loading...
Answers
MenuI'm looking for data mapping/analyzing software or excell tips to use my past sales data in order to project future sales by a week at a time.
I have an etsy and amazon shop and I'm grabbing the data from ship station a week at a time and am realizing that it would take a ton of time to create a weekly breakdown and forcast by manually maping the data out on an excell sheet, but it would be really helpful to have these projections in order to plan our buying and manufactoring, and it would also be fun to project how much cash we may make this year by calculating the difference in our growth.
Answers
This isn't what I normally do for clients ... at all.
But I write Excel formulas and custom-code databases every day and have a solid background in statistics.
Sounds like what you're asking could be done in an hour using Excel ... and in such a way that you'd be able to enter future data in the spreadsheet on your own and have it analyzed automatically.
Maybe software exists. Maybe you can hire someone on Fiverr. But if neither of those options works for you and you're willing to overpay someone overqualified for the task, I suppose I could set it up. Might be a nice break from real work!
Go for a specialist who has work in data analytics spectrum, someone who has good business and statistics knowledge. There a number of freelancers and reputed companies, www.marketquotient,com can surely help.
Excel is still a solution for a big deal of your needs .
But for visualization you need to check "Tableau".. It is a really different experience that will take you in a different dimension.
For a deeper statistical analysis , you may go to mini tab , which has an edge on excel when come to statistics.. But still visually , tableau is waaaay better .
I'm a data scientist and look into questions like this frequently. Until recently, I ran the data science organization at a payment processor, where we answered questions like this for merchants on a daily basis, and also built products at scale to help inform merchants' decision making.
The question here really is: can you predict these sales numbers well enough to inform specific buying and manufacturing decisions? Sales numbers are difficult to predict precisely for many reasons (week to week fluctuations can be pretty high, seasonality can be a big factor depending on what you're selling, it's very helpful but often difficult to separate sales from existing and new customers, etc.), but as long as you can predict them well enough and far enough in advance to make better decisions you can create a positive financial impact. The point is that this isn't so much a question about predicting the sales as well as you can, but a question about optimizing your decision making process.
Therefore, I'd encourage you to engage the help of someone who has experience in solving operational business problems using data. One of the first things a good data person should do is help you quantify the size of the problem - how much money you can save by doing this analysis. This will help you determine how much time and money to put into it to make sure that the project has a positive return on investment.
Projections are not only based on data but also on operations, products, people and process. There are couple tactics you can use without mapping a large data.
Other things you should look at are the people who execute behind your products because mostly they are the one causing sales problem, not the product or its data projection.
By implementing couple tactics you can figure out easily the product that sells most, your A players people, and implement a marketing strategy that sells.
Give me a buzz. We can set up together the process for you.
Related Questions
-
How to analyse and prove to business stakeholders that a website redesign (b2b hardware) is better than a previous one?
Here are a few factors I would look at: - Mobile Friendly - Page Load Speed Testing - Competitor Analysis - Typical Industry Conversion Rates A few other things to look at I would recommend would be: - Look at insights/data from companies that do a lot of testing with different designs and conversion rates. Sources such as Unbounce and Neil Patel - https://blog.kissmetrics.com/color-psychology/ - are good. - Check out A/B testing software as you could perhaps start running tests on different things to get support for the need for a redesign. Also, don't forget to look at SEO factors. I hope this help. Feel free to give me a call if you'd like to discuss in greater detail.JN
-
What is the simplest / best way of implementing NPS (net promoter score) and CSAT (customer satisfaction) metrics at a small but old company?
Use Delighted: https://delighted.com/CB
-
Decision Makers: Are Rows+ Columns really > than charts?
It depends on what you mean by "Visualized Data." Do decision makers use graphs, charts, dashboards, etc? Yes of course. Are there some visualizations that wouldn't be of any value to a decision maker whatsoever? Also yes of course. You can't show me a word cloud if I work as a portfolio manager for a bank and expect me to make any decisions from it. That being said, the social media team might be able to. It all depends on the audience, and whether or not you're making patterns they care about easier to detect. If you are talking about graphs/charts/dashboards, what I would do if I was in your shoes is I would try to make one dashboard with (say) 3-4 graphs inside of it, and then I'd show them that dashboard and say something like, "You know, I've been thinking about that conversation we had. And I definitely appreciate the point you made about fluff visualizations. But I also really think there's at least a few charts that would be really valuable to you. I whipped a few together (on my time, not yours!). Do you have a few minutes that you could spare to come have a look at them with me?"EV
-
What are the best traits to look for in a data scientist/data analyst?
First off, I have several people I could introduce. I'd also like to know the industry you're operating in, what the data looks like, where it comes from, and how much it needs to be cleaned up if putting into a relational database, or if the better solution would be a distributed file system like MongoDB where you don't necessarily need to normalize the data. Also, if you're a startup, or if the company is well established with many existing customers and if this is for a new initiative. Assuming you're working with a relational database, which it sounds like you are, you will want to implement something like Tableau or build out a custom dashboard using Google Charts, HighCharts, D3Js, or any number of other potential dashboarding/visualization solutions, which usually involves some programming/scripting in JavaScript. There are paid solutions like Tableau (which is amazingly powerful), and then there are free/open source options. I'd be happy to talk about possible ways to architect the solution, and discover who you would need once I understand the variables more. If you're building a web application, then you will likely need someone who is also a full stack developer, meaning they can handle building the back end and the front end in addition to the data requirements. Many early startups choose Ruby on Rails (because there is a ton of open source code out there for it) with Twitter Bootstrap (modified) and in order to visualize the data, they will need to work with JavaScript. It makes sense to have this person act as initial product and to derive the insights out of the data. They're pretty much the only person who can do this anyways, because they're the ones on the data. If you're in an early stage startup, I would recommend the strongest business owner (usually the early stage startup's CEO) be directly involved with this person on communicating what value your solution brings to clients, and what they pay you for, and in brainstorming on potential features and reports. Once the solution becomes established, and many customers start using it directly, there should be a different product person interfacing to those customers over time, gathering feature requests from customers and bringing it back to the Data Scientist/Analyst who spends their time working on the data. Depending on whether the solutions are SQL or NoSQL or hybrid, there are different types of Data Science professionals you should consider: 1. Data Scientist 2. Data Engineer 3. Data Modeler/Analyst 1. The Data Scientist handles experimenting with the data, and is able to prove statistically significant events and statistically valid arguments. Normally, this person would have modeling skills with Matlab, R, or perhaps SAS, and they should also have some programming/scripting skills with C++ or Python. It really depends on your whole environment and the flow of data. In my experience, Data Scientists that exclusively use SAS are sometimes extremely skilled PhD level statisticians and focused exclusively on the accuracy of the models (which is okay), but often not sufficiently skilled to fit within an early startup's big data environment in today's world and handle all of the responsibilities you'd like them to handle described in your question. I'm am not bad mouthing SAS people as they are often the MOST talented mathematicians and I have a great deal of respect for their minds, but if they do not have the programming skills, they become isolated within a group without a Data Engineer helping them along. Often a SAS user trying to fit into this environment will force you to use a stack of technologies that a skilled Data Architect would not recommend using. It takes programming in some object oriented language to fit into today's big data environments, and the better Data Scientists are using hybrid functional and OOP programming languages like Scala. Extremely hard to find Data Scientist can also work with graph databases like Neo4j, Titan, or Apache Giraph. 2. The Data Engineer, if you're dealing with a firehose of data like Twitter and capturing it into a NoSQL architecture, this is the person who would prepare the data for the Data Scientist to analyze. They often are capable of using machine learning libraries like WEKA to transform data, or techniques like MapReduce on Hadoop. 3. The Data Modeler/Analyst is someone who can use a tool like SAS, SPSS, Matlab, or even R, probably a very strong advanced Excel user, but likely won't be a strong programmer, although perhaps they will have a computer science degree and have some academic programming experience. The most important thing to watch out for is someone who is too academic, and has not been proven to deliver a solution in the real world. This will really screw you up if you're a startup, and could be the reason you fail. Often, the startup will run out of money due to the time it takes to deliver a complete solution or in the startup's case, a minimally viable product. Ask for examples of their work, and specifically dig into what it is that they did for that solution. I've tried to cover a pretty broad range of possibilities here, but it's best to talk in specifics. I'd be happy to discuss this with you in detail. To answer your question, is it perfectly reasonable for someone to handle all of the responsibilities described in your question, if you find the right type of person with the appropriate skills, and a history of success.SE
-
What's the best data analytics dashboard software for an app start up to use to manage user analytics AND marketing?
I would start with google analytics. If you configure it correctly you can get quite far down the line for free. Once you start seeing revenue and need more detail you can move over to one of the more premium or paid for systems.OI
the startups.com platform
Copyright © 2025 Startups.com. All rights reserved.