Key questions from the GoodData e-commerce webinar

If you didn’t already know, we held a webinar last month, digging deep into the power of business intelligence and data analytics, specifically for the e-commerce market.

One key area of our webinars that always brings great insights and helps explore specific topics in more depth, are your questions. Here’s a list of the top e-commerce related questions you asked and we answered.

Can we create an ecommerce data product for online retail and sell it to online retail companies’ customers (as a software vendor) or do we have to be an online retailer to use the GoodData platform?

Software vendors and online retail companies can both benefit from the GoodData platform. EIther to use for their own ecommerce data or to re-sell as a package to brands and suppliers.

Brands get weekly or monthly static reports or batch exports. Is this possible with GoodData? Can we schedule the exports?

You can schedule exports at the time intervals that suit you and your brands. GoodData gives the ability to do this for each end-user so brands with different requirements can all be catered for. A user more accustomed to spreadsheets and email-based reports can choose to receive dashboards and insights via email. This more traditional way of viewing data can also be used to encourage users to access their data through the platform directly. These functions can be set on the user and administrative level.

You mentioned Agile cadence in your webinar. Can we synchronize the release/sprint cycles of our engineering teams with release management of GoodData? E.g. commit the dashboards update automatically with continuous deployment tools?

The GoodData platform is accompanied by a large set of development tools, including an extensive set of APIs and life-cycle management tools. As such, engineers can synchronize data analytics release schedules with updates to their own application or platform.

You mentioned a shift in demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Did GoodData, being a data company, participate in research related to the crisis?

Early on in the pandemic we started to think about how we, as a data company, could help answer important questions in relation to the crisis. And as such, we joined forces with, Emarsys, one of our partners, to launch the Covid-19 Commerce Insight tracker to track real-time consumer spending online around the world in key sectors. The tracker is one of the first to bring real-time insight to economic patterns that typically take weeks or months to bubble up through more official channels, such as those tracked by the U.S. Department of Commerce. ccinsights.org

We often have requirements from our franchises to add an additional column with calculated metrics, or to use a metric from a different ‘non-standard’ data source. Is it necessary to rewrite all report queries for these types of requirements?

You’ll be pleased to hear that it’s not. GoodData’s robust semantics is designed in a way that enables your data to be metrics aware and, therefore, adding additional metrics or columns from ‘non-standard’ data sources won’t cause you to re-write any of your existing queries.

The dashboards in the application look great - what skills do we need in order to develop this type of application (we only have a BI specialist and small team of front-end coders)?

One of the great benefits of GoodData is that the dashboards and ad-hoc reporting features are designed to be accessible to any level of data-literacy. That is to say, even the data novice who has no prior experience of using data can easily understand how to use these features to visualize the data important to them.

Moreover, GoodData has the expertise and workforce in order to help you use the GoodData platform in a way that best compliments your application or use case.

Regarding Growth pricing - when we connect to our BigQuery warehouse, do we have to model the data relations in an external tool or is it integrated in GoodData?

Data modelling is integrated in the GoodData platform meaning that you don’t need to employ a third-party application to model data relations when connecting to data warehouses like BigQuery, Snowflake or the like.

GoodData is offering a proof of concept in two days. If we apply, can we then start for free or do we have to start with the Growth tier?

You can. The Proof of Concept is designed to give you an in-depth understanding of how the GoodData platform works on your data using your use case. When you’re ready to deploy GoodData analytics further, maybe as part of a pilot scheme for your brands and suppliers) you can do so with the Free plan to get you started.

What are the limits of GoodData Free when validating my business case?

GoodData Free gives you 5 workspaces each with 100MB storage capacity. A workspace can support an unlimited number of users. When you’re ready, the Growth plan is priced per workspace, not per user, allowing you to efficiently scale your data analytics at a predictable cost-effective rate.

Want to learn more about GoodData for e-commerce or request a proof of concept? Get in touch with our team and we’ll be happy to help guide you through the GoodData platform.