Abstract:

Business Analytics is an umbrella of knowledge that contains several areas aiming to analyze and understand data in order to assist enterprises and decision makers to improve their decisions and to lead to better business outcomes. Those enterprises include public, private and non-profit organizations regardless of their size, revenue, or any other factors. E-commerce has better opportunities to harness the significance of business analytics due to the business nature of automated systems and data availability. This study aims to explore the capabilities and the possible research directions in business analytics area to support the maturity of having data driven e-commerce. It also highlights the common challenges that could affect the streamlining of the process. It starts by highlighting the broad categories of business analytics to absorb the main research directions in this area. Then, business analytics applications were discussed briefly to show some of its capabilities to drive enterprises. After that, business analytics practices in the e-commerce environment were discussed to shed light on the possible research directions, that is followed by discussing the common Business analytics challenges that researchers should be aware of. This study concluded that business analytics could be harnessed in research by itself or in conjunction with other areas of knowledge to provide useful insights and to drive business outcomes. In addition, several challenges could encounter researchers, and one of the major challenges is the availability of the required data.