Building a data and analytics platform to service Candle Shack’s eCommerce growth ambitions

Our client is a British-based eCommerce company, selling supplies to business and consumer clients, as well as handling manufacturing contracts. They wished to become more data-driven to give them a competitive edge and enable more advanced analytics capabilities including AI and automated decisioning.

Their starting point on this journey required a new data platform built on AWS, along with some initial reports to enable customer lifetime value and cohort analysis. They also deal with perishable goods, so their first significant step forward made possible through the new platform was granular, seasonal demand forecasting and inventory monitoring.

We partnered with the client’s internal teams to develop a roadmap and define the initial MVP scope for the data platform and initial reports to be supported by it. We analysed their primary ERP system and built a curated data lake and warehouse to support their initial analytical requirements, using a sophisticated security and access model and encryption to build a secure data platform for their business data.

We later used the enhanced data available to us to build the seasonal demand forecasting, using sophisticated modelling techniques to help them plan the purchase and storage of perishable goods more effectively and reduce losses from unsold, expired inventory.

We successfully delivered the new data platform and initial reports in only 12 weeks. By leveraging AWS’ serverless services such as Lambda Step Functions, the monthly cost for the whole platform is only $70 a month to produce the customer lifetime value, customer lifecycle analysis, demand forecasting and exception daily reporting, significantly speeding up the ROI invested in the platform to date.