.jpg?width=2880&name=image_2880x750px%20(1).jpg "Building robust e-commerce on a single set of data")
Body & Fit is a leading sports, nutrition and wellbeing eCommerce specialist. Since its establishment, the company developed comprehensive e-tail operations across Benelux, Germany, France, UK. With more than 3,000 products from 300 top brands, including its strong house brand, the company receives more than two million orders a year.
In 2017 Body & Fit became part of Glanbia, the world’s largest sports nutrition company bringing a strong brand and significant knowledge of the industry and eCommerce retailing for other Glanbia brands to adopt.
Body & Fit wanted to create a best-in-class eCommerce platform which they could easily expand to new countries and other Glanbia brands. To achieve this Body & Fit aimed to address the scalability and the system integration issues. They teamed up with Crystalloids to build a new architecture on Google Cloud Platform. Combining data from various sources, such as eCommerce platform, warehouse management system or Google Analytics, a central point of truth for data was created.
“We need to collect data, store it, and use it both to create reports and get the insights to drive customers to our platform,” says Fritjof, Head of technology at Body & Fit. “Google Cloud offers technology to support that whole process, while its excellent scalability provides us with a big advantage."
Having one central point for all data, a Customer Data Platform (CDP), is critical for any eCommerce company that wants to continue evolving. The single source of truth enables Body & Fit to track customer journeys across multiple touchpoints, automate business processes and focus on mastering the customer experience.
“For the scalability that we need for this project, cloud is an obvious choice. We have a small technology team, and managed databases and infrastructure give us more time for other tasks,” says Fritjof.
At Crystalloids, we have developed the processes, building blocks and Google Cloud integrations that could easily be applied to Body & Fit. Using our so-called ContactAPI, each customer now gets a unique contactID assigned. This way, customers can be identified across various systems including Hybris, Magento, Clang, Robin HQ and GA360. To ensure the data is consistent real-time we queue JSON messages from all data sources, such as the website and contact centre application in Pub/Sub.
To process the data both in batches and in real-time, we use Cloud Dataflow, writing it to a data lake on Cloud Storage and Cloud Datastore. BigQuery then allows capturing, analysing and querying the data real-time so that informed decisions can be made quickly.
These tools now enable the Body & Fit team to have the right information available anywhere, anytime and work as a solid basis when it comes to automating processes and democratising data analysis.
For reporting, there have been three tools put in place: Tableau for dashboarding, InsightOS for marketing selections without coding by list managers, and Google Data Studio is being used for monitoring purposes on the data, connectors, and cloud consumption. Website data from Google Analytics are fed to BigQuery which combined with other information and order data help to create a complete 360 degree of the customer.
Once the single view of the customer has been set up, Body & Fit also wanted to improve the customer experiences and loyalty by offering highly personalized product recommendations. This has been achieved by introducing the Google Recommendations AI to their website, which is able to dynamically modify the assortment, pricing, and special offers according to the customer's behaviour..png?width=820&name=Copy%20of%20Google%20Assistant%20Dutch%20(13).png "E-commerce transformation with smart data analytics")
“We need to collect data, store it, and use it both to create reports and get the insights to drive customers to our platform. Google Cloud offers technology to support that whole process, while its excellent scalability provides us with a big advantage.”
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Established in 2006, our goal is to streamline the business experience by emphasising informed decision-making. We design ready-to-use data applications and custom-crafted solutions that offer your company a competitive advantage.
