Costway: Offering personalized online shopping experiences through highly efficient data analytics
About Costway
Founded in 2015, Costway is a Chinese new retail company with a core mission of product innovation and customer service offering more than 10,000 products to consumers abroad. As of 2022, the company’s overseas ecommerce platform has since expanded to 11 countries, with 10 branch offices and 22 overseas warehouses across Europe, North America and Australia. The annual revenue of Costway Group has reached more than 12 billion RMB, with 95% of the sales coming from the products of its own brand. Costway currently serves more than one million consumers every year.
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About WebEye
WebEye integrates global resources and uses the best technology to build a global digital growth ecosystem around 'content,’ 'traffic,' and 'data,’ helping all enterprises to connect to the world market.
WebEye provides a range of customized services such as cloud consulting, cloud migration, and cloud management to accelerate the digital transformation of enterprises. In 2021, WebEye achieved Google Cloud Managed Services Provider (MSP) status and was the winner of the 2021 Google Cloud Breakthrough Partner for Asia Pacific, based on its extensive technical capabilities in Google Cloud solutions and products.
To conduct more in-depth and efficient data analyses for better marketing strategies, Costway leverages Google Cloud to build a centralized data warehouse that supports synchronization with various data sources and quick report generation.
Google Cloud results
- Supports a centralized data warehouse synchronized with various data sources with BigQuery
- Reduces time required to generate data analytics reports from several hours to 15 to 30 minutes
- Helps provide error-free and efficient delivery services with Places API
Increases website conversion rate by 50%
Riding the boom of cross-border ecommerce, numerous Chinese retailers are leveraging the country’s manufacturing power to sell cost-effective products abroad. For these companies to provide consumers around the world with quality services, having an efficient and widespread global logistics network is key.
Costway has realized continuous sales growth and business expansion through offering a wide selection of quality products and building warehouses that are closer to its customers. The Chinese homeware brand started from selling items on established ecommerce websites and eventually in 2015 launched its own platform Costway, which is now available in 11 countries. With its branch offices and warehouses across Europe, North America and Australia, Costway is able to supply and provide timely services to more than one million customers around the world every year.
"What makes us unique compared to other cross-border ecommerce merchants is that we produce all our products, and operate the whole supply chain by ourselves," notes Jerry Xia, operations director at Costway. "This way, we can guarantee our customers in different countries high product quality and efficient customer services."
To offer more personalized online shopping experiences and implement more effective marketing strategies, Costway has been analyzing its business data to understand its customers and operations better. But the scope and depth of its data analyses were limited, because the company’s databases were scattered across its offices and warehouses in various countries. So in late 2021, Costway decided to build a centralized data warehouse in a cloud environment, and landed on Google Cloud for its full integration with Google Analytics, which the brand has been using to store and analyze its ad data from Google Ads since 2015.
"To conduct more in-depth and efficient data analytics, we needed to set up a centralized data warehouse that aggregates our ad data on Google Analytics and business data from our databases around the world," explains Xia. "Google Cloud supports the best and fastest integration, because it can be directly connected with Google Analytics without the need of an API."
"To conduct more in-depth and efficient data analytics, we needed to set up a centralized data warehouse that aggregates our ad data on Google Analytics and business data from our databases around the world. Google Cloud supports the best and fastest integration, because it can be directly connected with Google Analytics without the need of an API."
—Jerry Xia, Operations Director, CostwayBuilding a centralized data warehouse supported by BigQuery
To put all its business data in one place, Costway started migrating the data from its ecommerce website hosted in North America, including traffic, user behavior and sales data, to BigQuery. With the help of Google Cloud partner WebEye, which laid out the steps of data migration, Costway swiftly completed the move and has gradually migrated its data stored in other regions following the same procedure. On top of that, the company connects BigQuery with Google Analytics to transfer its ad data from Google Ads, and with Firebase to send the user behavior data of its ecommerce app to its data warehouse. As a result, Costway now has a data warehouse that contains all its business data and synchronizes with all the data sources daily.
"The data warehouse on BigQuery is now the foundation of all our data analyses. Thanks to the easy integration of BigQuery with different data sources, we’re able to gather the latest data from our advertising channels, ecommerce website, ecommerce app and internal databases, and have them ready for any type of data analyses we need," says Xia.
"The data warehouse on BigQuery is now the foundation of all our data analyses. Thanks to the easy integration of BigQuery with different data sources, we’re able to gather the latest data from our advertising channels, ecommerce website, ecommerce app and internal databases, and have them ready for any type of data analyses we need."
—Jerry Xia, Operations Director, CostwayDriving increased business performance through efficient data analytics
With its data warehouse on BigQuery, Costway is able to easily conduct data analyses that require data from multiple data sources and quickly generate reports by linking BigQuery with Looker. Previously, running a report on how one product is received by consumers required Costway’s data team to manually retrieve traffic and browse records from the database of its website, as well as sales records from its enterprise resource planning system. Data analyses were run on an Excel sheet, which normally took several hours. Today, the team can generate the same report on Looker within 15-30 minutes.
"Connecting our data warehouse on BigQuery with Looker has greatly enhanced the capabilities and work efficiency of our data team," explains Xia. "Before, our data analytics workloads were heavily manual, and it required at least one engineer to provide relevant technical support. Now, our data team can conduct more complex data analyses on its own, and our engineers are fully dedicated to DevOps work."
With the results generated by more in-depth and detailed data analytics, Costway is able to design better user experiences and marketing campaigns based on its customers’ preferences. By displaying the information that can increase consumers’ interest to buy a product, such as discount and membership benefits, at the most effective timing on its ecommerce website, Costway has seen its website conversion rate grow by 50%. The deeper understanding of its customers has also enabled the company to run more targeted ads and maintain an annual sales growth of at least 60-80%.
Optimizing ecommerce services with Places API and Translation AI
Besides data analytics, Google Cloud has also helped Costway easily optimize its services with other highly automated tools. The ecommerce merchant now uses Places API to display street names when its customers fill in their shipping addresses on its website and app. Before, Costway’s customers needed to enter their addresses letter by letter, which often led to delivery issues when the addresses were wrongly input or spelled. Since Places API retrieves address data from Google Maps Platform, the Costway team can ensure that its customers always submit addresses that exist, preventing issues resulting from incorrect shipping information.
Given its rapid expansion within the European market, Costway has been leveraging Translation AI to automatically translate its ecommerce website content into languages that are less widely spoken. Xia says that the team compared the translations generated by Translation AI and other similar offerings, and found that it delivers the most natural translation, in particular for ecommerce terms.
"By guaranteeing smooth shipping and delivering quality translation, Places API and Translation AI have helped us enhance our services, and quickly expand into new markets to reach more consumers, which is crucial for our business growth," he adds.
Prepared for future changes with the power of data
Next, Costway plans to use Recommendations AI to generate personalized product recommendations for its customers, and Search API to enhance the site search function of its ecommerce website and app. With its well-established data warehouse on BigQuery, the company is ready to conduct any data analyses that can further drive its business performance in the fast-changing ecommerce market.
Xia says, "The ecommerce industry is always evolving. With excellent data analytics capabilities powered by Google Cloud, we’re confident that we can use the power of data to overcome any potential challenges and keep up with the latest market trends in the future."
"The ecommerce industry is always evolving. With excellent data analytics capabilities powered by Google Cloud, we’re confident that we can use the power of data to overcome any potential challenges and keep up with the latest market trends in the future."
—Jerry Xia, Operations Director, CostwayTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Costway
Founded in 2015, Costway is a Chinese new retail company with a core mission of product innovation and customer service offering more than 10,000 products to consumers abroad. As of 2022, the company’s overseas ecommerce platform has since expanded to 11 countries, with 10 branch offices and 22 overseas warehouses across Europe, North America and Australia. The annual revenue of Costway Group has reached more than 12 billion RMB, with 95% of the sales coming from the products of its own brand. Costway currently serves more than one million consumers every year.
About WebEye
WebEye integrates global resources and uses the best technology to build a global digital growth ecosystem around 'content,’ 'traffic,' and 'data,’ helping all enterprises to connect to the world market.
WebEye provides a range of customized services such as cloud consulting, cloud migration, and cloud management to accelerate the digital transformation of enterprises. In 2021, WebEye achieved Google Cloud Managed Services Provider (MSP) status and was the winner of the 2021 Google Cloud Breakthrough Partner for Asia Pacific, based on its extensive technical capabilities in Google Cloud solutions and products.