How one e-commerce platform went from data mistrust to data confidence
Since 2007, PrestaShop has helped companies unlock the power of e-commerce through its open-source platform. Over 300,000 merchants worldwide use the PrestaShop platform to grow their merchantry and serve online shoppers.
"Our open-source strategy to ecommerce enablement sets us apart," says Rémi Paulin, Ph.D., Data Architect at PrestaShop. "Customization is rhadamanthine increasingly crucial to retailers, and our open-source platform allows companies to continually evolve their sites and services to stand out from competitors."
As PrestaShop grew, it wished to derive increasingly value from its data, but the visitor ran into issues caused by a legacy, siloed tracery that negatively impacted data consistency and accessibility.
Let's squint at how PrestaShop works with Google Deject and partners Fivetran and Hightouch to proceeds increasingly tenancy over data, enable a beyond-BI data strategy, and increase employee engagement from less than 10% to increasingly than 40%.
Improving trust in data
Core systems at PrestaShop, including SQL and NoSQL databases, and SaaS Applications, were siloed; each presenting its own data, often captured from variegated sources such as support tickets, marketing engagement, purchase activity, and product usage. This setup made data overall inconsistent as no single system would contain a source of truth, resulting in many inefficiencies, poor collaboration wideness teams, and a reluctance to use data to support key decisions.
"Not long ago, less than 10% of the visitor regularly relied on data, so we were missing opportunities to make increasingly data-driven decisions," says Paulin. "Data was underutilized, and people were rapidly losing trust in data."
PrestaShop set out to diamond a new tracery to write past challenges, such as lack of data consistency, and modernize data accessibility.
"Google Cloud, withal with Hightouch and Fivetran, unliable us to build a modern stack to solve these challenges and support our beyond-BI data strategy."
Building a modern data stack
The first step was to build a robust data ingestion pipeline. After considering several vendors, PrestaShop chose to work with Fivetran to pericope data from SaaS applications, including Zendesk, HubSpot, and GitHub, to load into BigQuery. They moreover use Datastream to stream Change Data Capture (CDC) data from transactional databases into BigQuery in real-time.
"Fivetran and Datastream are no-ops, efficient and highly reliable, and relieve our Data Engineers of management tasks. This brings us a upper stratum of conviction to build the rest of the stack atop these services," says Paulin.
PrestaShop relies on several Google Deject solutions, including Dataflow, and a managed Spark service by Ascend.io, for data transformation. It moreover uses Looker for its semantic modeling capacities and as a self-serve data platform.
As the visitor unfurled on its journey to transform how it manages and benefits from data, it engaged Hightouch to enable data serviceability through activation. Sitting on top of Looker, Hightouch unlocks all data models for operational intelligence. For example, in just a few days, the team built a consumer knowledge model combining data from multiple sources and used Hightouch to sync data from the semantic layer to Zendesk via Reverse ETL. This unliable the superintendency team to make increasingly data-informed decisions, speeding up the time to resolve support tickets submitted through Zendesk by 33%.
"Hightouch feels like a natural extension of Looker and reinforces the position of the semantic data model as the single source of truth," says Paulin. "It powers a variety of Data Activation use cases, supporting our beyond-BI strategy by providing teams with wangle to data when and where they need it to modernize everyday operations. This has a big impact on the company, bolstering employee trust in misogynist data."
Becoming data-driven
In less than six months, PrestaShop managed to get the unshortened data stack up and running, build over 30 data models and engage over 120 employees with a small team of only two Data Engineers.
"Data is now wieldy to every stakeholder within the company, regardless of their technical abilities," says Paulin.
PrestaShop has once seen much progress in its shift to a increasingly data-driven visitor and is excited to roll out increasingly self-service intelligence capabilities in the future.
"Google Deject drives home a culture of simplicity virtually our data stack, which is essential for us, expressly given the small size of our engineering team," says Paulin. "Fivetran and Hightouch share this culture of simplicity. Together, they offer strong foundations to support our data needs."
Dashboards, which the visitor had unchangingly had an want for, are seamlessly created today. Before moving to Looker, a full-fledged dashboard would take an stereotype of six weeks to develop. Now, it takes less than two days - and a simple dashboard can be created autonomously by merchantry users in as little as 15 minutes.
Furthermore, data usage goes vastitude dashboards. Thanks to Looker's self-service exploration capabilities, many stakeholders can now glean insights surrounding product issues and merchantry opportunities. Thanks to Hightouch, teams can vivify their data to make largest and smarter operational decisions.
"This is a big leap forward and one of many to come as we protract to add new models, vivify our data, and onboard increasingly users," says Paulin. "Given our global reach and unique tideway to e-commerce enablement, we know this is just the start of the unconfined things we can succeed with Google Cloud, Fivetran, and Hightouch."
Check out Fivetran on Google Deject Marketplace, or sign up for a free Hightouch workspace to learn increasingly well-nigh what partners can do for your business.