It is very important to document consumer profiles in the data warehouse. Consumer profile constitutes an essential component when the organization needs reports on the operating trends and patterns and how the organization is performing.

If the organization is into a business competition, having customer profiles in the database can give the answer to the following issues:

•  Basis on the product gross margin and customer cost of service, who are the most profitable customers today?
•  Where these the same customers who were also the most profitable last month or last year?
•  What products are selling the best and which ones are the least in sales performance?
•  Which particular products are popular among a certain age bracket?
•  What products need to be reinvented and what new products can be derived to cater to the taste of the market aged 21-30 year old?

If the organization is a government entity, the consumer profiles may answer questions like:

•  Who are the country’s citizens?
•  What are the jobs available for the people?
•  Who among the people earn less than the minimum wage?
•  Which regional area are the poorest and has the most inefficient way to delivering basic service to the people?
•  What is the crime rate of a certain big city?

People on the internet cruise one from one site to another, read articles, register on their favorite website and make purchases online through the website that they trust. As they do these activities, they are actually giving information about themselves.

It may surprise some people that when they open certain web pages, the ads that appear are often related to their taste and interest.

The capture and use of consumer profiles are on web activities have been a great fueling force in e-commerce. Many online websites set up separate database to exclusive function as recommendation engines.

Using consumer profiles for e-commerce sites can be a very complicated activity. People do not just stick to one website. And online companies will have to make sure that they recommend the appropriate product to the right market. But consumer profiles are constantly changing.

There can be several reasons why consumer profiles get out of data. It could be that the consumer has been away from the site or they have simply changed preferences. One reason why consumer profiles change is not because the consumers themselves caused the changed but because of poor algorithms in the servers that could not come up with correct analytical processes.

Most data warehouses for e-commerce sites have engines that observe behavioral activities on the site. These engines track purchases, registrations, visited product reviews and all other activities which they may get information about. This way, consumer profiles are constantly updated.

Getting consumer profiles can be a heavy workload on the data warehouse servers. Servers need to weed out irrelevant data. More sophisticated data warehouse setups use a complex combination of content, age, frequency and other unique factors to deliver the best possible way of targeting advertising to the right markets.

There are several software applications on the market that specifically deals with consumer profiles. Some intelligent business solutions are composed of a suite of many solutions to many aspects of business and consumer profiling is among the suite of solutions.