Walmart's Sales Data Analysis - A Big Data Analytics Perspective

Information technology in this 21st century is reaching the skies with large-scale of data to be processed and studied to make sense of data where the traditional approach is no more effective. Now, retailers need a 360-degree view of their consumers, without which, they can miss competitive edge of the market. Retailers have to create effective promotions and offers to meet its sales and marketing goals, otherwise they will forgo the major opportunities that the current market offers. Many times it is hard for the retailers to comprehend the market condition since their retail stores are at various geographical locations. Big Data application enables these retail organizations to use prior year’s data to better forecast and predict the coming year’s sales. It also enables retailers with valuable and analytical insights, especially determining customers with desired products at desired time in a particular store at different geographical locations. In this paper, we analysed the data sets of world’s largest retailers, Walmart Store to determine the business drivers and predict which departments are affected by the different scenarios (such as temperature, fuel price and holidays) and their impact on sales at stores’ of different locations. We have made use of Scala and Python API of the Spark framework to gain new insights into the consumer behaviours and comprehend Walmart’s marketing efforts and their data-driven strategies through visual representation of the analysed data.