US-based e-commerce store: Enterprise data warehouse and reporting

1 min read

Retail

Retail & Consumer Goods

Data & Analytics

Our client, a large US-based e-commerce store generating over $20M in yearly sales, required a transformation of their data infrastructure to support business growth. We spearheaded an end-to-end cloud migration of their on-premises data warehouse to Azure, enhancing reporting agility and scalability. The reporting and data analysis of the migrated data, enabled the client to leverage over 300 million records spanning five years of business activity with reporting on sales, shipping and warehouse inventory. Delivering real-time insights, enhancing decisions made across the business as well as an optimised performance of reporting to increase visibility and speed of data retrieval.

Outcome 1: Delivered near-instant reports on up to 30,000 rows, enabling business users to search historical and live data by order and customer
Outcome 2: Increased data visibility by 100% through cloud migration and streamlined architecture, enabling a complete view of the dataset for improved forecasting and inventory management
Outcome 3: Implemented a gold layer in the Azure, optimising refresh cadences to improve performance and reduce cloud costs

The challenge

The e-commerce industry is experiencing rapid growth, driven by increasing consumer demand for speed, personalisation and seamless experiences. For a US-based store generating over $20M annually, staying competitive required overcoming the limitations of outdated on-premises systems. Moving to the cloud and enabling agile, real-time reporting became essential to handle vast data volumes, optimise operations and respond swiftly to market trends. This transformation allowed the business to scale efficiently, gain actionable insights for inventory and sales decisions and maintain a competitive edge in a fast-evolving digital marketplace, ensuring sustained growth and customer satisfaction.

The e-commerce sector is driven by the need for real-time insights, scalability and operational efficiency to meet customer expectations and remain competitive. Our client, a prominent US e-commerce store with annual sales exceeding $20M, faced significant limitations with their on-premises data warehouse. Issues with scalability, slow reporting speeds and lack of access to real-time data hindered their ability to make informed decisions on sales, shipping and inventory management. With over 300 million records spanning five years of business activity, the existing infrastructure struggled to provide the agility needed for granular reporting and trend analysis. The client required a modern, cloud-based solution to overcome these bottlenecks and unlock the full potential of their data.

The approach

We collaborated closely with the client for an end-to-end cloud migration of their on-premises data warehouse to Azure, using Azure tools like ETL pipelines and data cleansing. A streamlined team, including a senior project lead, a data engineer for historical data ingestion and a reporting engineer for modelling, ensured cost efficiency. We designed a complex snowflake schema with models for sales and inventory, introduced a gold layer for summarised data, optimised queries with varied refresh cadences and developed intricate DAX measures in Power BI. This balanced granular detail with performance, minimising refresh times and cloud costs.

The impact

The cloud migration revolutionised our client’s e-commerce data infrastructure, offering agility and scalability. Power BI dashboards enabled instant access to granular data, speeding up decision-making. A 100% increase in data visibility helped predict trends, optimise inventory, enhance customer satisfaction and cut costs. Optimised models ensured swift report performance, while improved inventory management, shipping, and forecasting supported growth. By streamlining data and reducing cloud resource usage, we provided a cost-effective, scalable solution for immediate and long-term strategic success, as well as providing training to our client so they can grow this new resource as the business demands change.