Description of the Data:
A comprehensive analysis of what types of products are being shipped to locations all over the United States. The data could be grouped by any kind of location: State, county, or zip code to just name a few.
Why this data is interesting:
To see what types of products are going where in the country would be a great guide for businesses. For instance, if there was a trend of home theatre electronics being delivered to a certain zip code in Ohio, it might be divined that someone could make a killing by opening up a home theatre store. A benefit to both the consumers, who now have a nearby location to purchase such things, and the business, that is now reaping the rewards.
How we can obtain the data:
Realistically, we can’t. However if some of the larger sites were willing to sell information based around the type of product sold and the zip code that it was shipped to, it would be possible to analyze the data in many meaningful ways.
Some might find it a breach of their privacy to have large corporations selling their private data of what they were buying. I’m certain these people will soon be quieted once they are witness to the fantastic savings and convenience that will come of it.
I wouldn’t think you’d have to worry about many companies signing on. If they would agree sites like buy.com and amazon.com would cover a good portion of the online shopping world. Meanwhile, digital version of real stores (target.com, bestbuy.com, etc…) would probably be happy to lend the data if it could be compiled with other sites that would then help them plan where to put their next store.
What specific questions can the data answer:
- What types of things are popular where?
- What part of the country buys the most of what?
- Where the best places would be for new specialty stores?
Entries (RSS)
November 13th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
In my opinion, this is too big of a spectrum of data to be considered for this type of project. For instance, there is an unlimited amount of data that is impossible to obtain for a project of this sort. While this is a very good idea for a project of a much larger magnitude, I do not feel as though there is enough time or resources for this project. In order for this project to truely be do-able, I feel as though the search spectrum should be considerably smaller. For instance instead of all products in all regions of the united states, focus on action figures to the southwest or electronics to the northeast. I feel that by breaking the data into smaller pieces it will be much more easily obtainable and much easier to analyze. The whole idea of stores opening based on where items are commonly shipped to is good speculation and my be true. It also should not be very difficult to retrieve information from the sites like bestbuy and target.