Largest 25 U.S retailers analysis

“Imagine you are a data analyst for a new retail company in the U.S. The company sales managers want you to investigate certain aspects of other retail companies, so they ask you to analyze data from the 25 largest retailers in the U.S.”

This is the context given to us in the final project of Datacademy, a 5-week introductory challenge by Platzi intended to help you start your career as a data professional. For this article, I translated my original solution from Spanish and turned it into a Tableau Public storyboard with the most important insights. Go check it out here, then come back to this page, I’ll wait (you can also check the original version in Spanish here).

Oh, you are back! To summarize what you saw, a company’s quantity of stores is not related to its sales. Also, the companies that sell exclusively online have almost double the sales of those that sell offline. Therefore, I think an online sales strategy is a good investment.

Talking about good investments, in terms of retail categories, we have two possibilities. Venture in either Home Improvement or Drug Stores. Drug Stores is a high-risk, high reward bet, while Home Improvement seems like a safer area for new ventures.

Finally, I leave you and my imaginary sales managers with this: do not compete against Walmart!