Moving from a physical store to a digital one can open up enormous opportunities for retail establishments. Because in a digital store, organizations can track customers’ every click as they search for products, click on recommendations, explore custom offers, engage with product feedback, complete their purchases, or abandon their digital shopping carts. However, an e-commerce company can only thrive when it has robust analytics processes and the right tools in place to sift through billions of these daily data-driven events and generate actionable insights.
Teams and processes
Organizationally, many e-commerce companies have a structure where data engineers and business analysts work together to build and maintain data pipelines.
Traditionally, business analysts identified raw data sources, relevant data fields, and the end-state that was needed for analytics. Data engineers then figured out how the raw data needed to be replicated from upstream, how often it should be brought in, and what kind of transformations needed to be performed on that data. They also had to account for any custom data that an analyst wanted to upload via Excel/CSV files. This reliance on data engineers meant that any time an analyst wanted to add a new data source, add or remove fields, or modify data transformations, the turnaround was slow and critical business insights were delayed.
To improve business agility and empower business analysts to generate the insights they need, teams are moving to a model where business analysts own the business logic and are empowered to implement as much as they can themselves, while the data engineers design and build the analytics stack, implement and manage complexity, optimize the performance, and provide governance.
Technologies and tools
Another area of advancement that is driving strong analytics at e-commerce companies is cloud data warehouses. Cloud data warehouses such as Amazon Redshift and Snowflake have enabled even small e-commerce companies to thrive by helping them process massive amounts of data with no upfront costs. This, in turn, allows them to understand their customers better and optimize and continuously improve the customer experience. Data teams at e-commerce companies have developed expertise in managing data warehouses and supporting the visualization layer with applications such as Tableau and Looker, but loading data into the data warehouse is still challenging due to the growing number of applications and data sources, variety of data formats, and brittle nature of code/SQL that supports data ingestion.
To tackle the complex problem of loading data efficiently into the data warehouse, organizations need a more robust data loading tool which can move data from a variety of data sources such as SaaS applications and databases without writing any code or SQL so that more people in an organization can build and maintain these pipelines.
Fast, code-free data loads from Salesforce and cloud databases
SnapLogic Fast Data Loader allows e-commerce companies to load data from Salesforce and cloud-based databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server in just a few clicks. You can easily load customer profiles, purchases, and sales interactions from Salesforce. You can add data on top such as personalized offers made to customers, and the customers’ response to such offers, helping you predict which products and offers are most likely to resonate and be successful.
Since there is no need to write code or SQL, any business analyst can load the data they need into their favorite cloud data warehouse whether it is Amazon Redshift or Snowflake, freeing those in IT to focus on value-adding work. IT can get rid of any data loading tasks from their backlog and empower business analysts to implement business logic themselves. Fast Data Loader is powered by the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform that leverages parallelism to load millions of rows of data in just a few hours.
With SnapLogic Fast Data Loader, you can:
- Specify the tables or objects you want to upload
- Replicate schema and data into your cloud data warehouse seamlessly
- Track historical data with just a click
- Load incremental data quickly after the initial bulk load
To learn more about SnapLogic Fast Data Loader and how you can increase customer lifetime value, please click here.
