1. Understand the Sales Problem

Duration1h15 AI Banned

Sales of a high-tech and multimedia shop

Context

A high-tech and multimedia retailer operates stores in several cities across the United States. The manager is preparing the next promotional period and wants to target advertisements more effectively. In particular, the retailer would like to identify the best moments, locations, and product groups for future campaigns. You have been asked to use the available sales records to support these decisions.

Data Description

The dataset contains sales transactions collected from stores in nine US cities. Each row describes a product included in an order through the following variables:

Variable	Meaning
Order ID	Unique identifier for an order; one order may contain several products
Product	Name of the product sold
Quantity Ordered	Number of units sold
Price Each	Price of one unit
Order Date	Date and time of the transaction
Purchase Address	Address associated with the transaction

Activity

Understanding the problem and the available data is essential before opening a notebook or selecting a statistical method. Discuss the following questions and record your answers; you will reuse them later when writing the project README.

Question 1: What information is already available in the problem statement? What important information is missing or ambiguous?

Question 2: Who are the stakeholders, what decisions do they need to make, and what would make the analysis useful to them?

Question 3: Suggest a list of analytical questions that can be answered with the available variables. Identify the main variable or variables of interest for each question.

Question 4: Describe the expected type, measurement scale, and analytical role of every variable.

Variable	Expected type or scale	Possible analytical role
Order ID
Product
Quantity Ordered
Price Each
Order Date
Purchase Address

Question 5: Based on your experience, which additional variables would improve the analysis? Explain how the retailer could collect them and whether they might raise privacy or ethical concerns.

Expected outcome

Before continuing, you should have a short description of the business objective, a list of answerable analytical questions, and an initial data dictionary. Keep these notes: they will become the first sections of your project README.