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Education

Your merchants For small businesses, being right
about assumptions isn't just an epi-
are flying blind sode of Freakonomics. On the contrary,
making good decisions can mean the
difference between staying open or
Barry Davis shutting down.
Womply Last fall, we surveyed 2,300 small
business owners throughout the
t Womply, we curate transaction data for millions of merchants, United States and found that one in
and as we analyze this data, we're constantly surprised by how five would close down within 30 days
often conventional wisdom is wrong. Following are a few examples if sales stopped. Being wrong can
A of what we've found: have devastating consequences when
• Most small businesses return to normal sales levels within a week of a you walk a razor's edge with cash
major hurricane. flow. So, how can merchants be right
• Big-box stores aren't the only ones raking it in on Black Friday. It's the more often? The resounding answer
is by using data.
top holiday sales day for small, local retailers, too – bigger than Small
Business Saturday. Transactions as a window
• Cinco de Mayo, St. Patrick's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and New Merchant level salespeople (MLSs)
Year's Eve are all better than Valentine's Day for local restaurant sales.
can help their merchant clients use
data to get more visibility and make
In each of these cases, the data completely contradicted our initial assumptions. better decisions. The insights mer-
If this is true at a macro level, it's certainly true for individual businesses, as chants need are often found within
well. Sadly, most merchants are flying blind when it comes to making data- their own payment transactions.
driven decisions about running their businesses.
Large companies have been harness-
ing payment and business perfor-
mance data for years. In fact, accord-
ing to Reuters, "business intelligence"
is ramping into a $30 billion industry
as big enterprises use analytics to
better understand what drives reve-
nue and value. Small businesses have
been left behind, but for those that
process card payments, transaction
data is a window into business and
market performance. If merchants
can get access to all of their transac-
tion data, they can see which days of
the week really are their best, what
their sales seasonality looks like over
the course of the year, whether or not
it makes sense to stay open on Sun-
days, and much more.

Structuring transaction data into a
useful format is another challenge.
Business owners who are handy with
spreadsheets may be able to do it
themselves, but the rest can take ad-
vantage of software built specifically
for this purpose. Enterprise-level
business intelligence tools like Domo
or Tableau are expensive and compli-
cated, but there's a growing menu of
options tailored specifically for small
businesses.

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