European flash-sale leader turns insights into action

About Vente-Exclusive

Founded in 2007, Vente-Exclusive is the Benelux market leader in online flash sales of exclusive fashion brands. With 3 million members, Vente-Exclusive was recently chosen as the best web shop of Belgium and best logistics web store in the Netherlands.

Google Cloud Platform Results

Offers more relevant products to its customers
Boosts revenue by reducing member turnover and diminishing returns

Background

With 3 million members and significant revenue flowing in every quarter, Vente-Exclusive, the leader in Benelux online flash sales, found itself at a critical juncture. Working with an external data storage partner, Vente-Exclusive had compiled a mountain of information about its customers and their brand preferences – more than 100 million rows of entry data a month. And the company was bursting with exciting new ideas that required advanced customer analytics to implement. For example, Vente-Exclusive wanted to develop sales triggers – opportune emails sent to members, based on their prior activity. The company also wanted to better align future product orders with past customer behaviors.

Challenge

Although Vente-Exclusive’s mountain of information continued to grow, its analytics infrastructure was limited and effectively broken. Data was warehoused across different servers. Queries about customer behavior, product relevance and shipping patterns took forever. Timely insights about potential marketing tools, sales campaigns and merchandising choices were lost. Frustration mounted. How would the company’s analysts extract value from all this data to discover what its customers truly wanted?

Solution

Through mutual colleagues, Vente-Exclusive was introduced to Datatonic, a data analytics consulting firm. “When we first came in,” says Nicolas Deruytter, Managing Director of Datatonic in Belgium, “we realized that Vente-Exclusive could not advance with their current infrastructure.”

Datatonic proposed using a suite of Google Cloud Platform products to create Vente-Exclusive’s advanced analytics system. Cloud Storage provided unlimited warehousing of raw data files about customers, products and shipping logistics from the Vente-Exclusive site. Running on Compute Engine, Hadoop (an open source software framework) then delivered powerful data processing of those files. The results, in billions of rows, were pumped into BigQuery for lightning-speed analysis and specific business insights. Tableau, a dashboard system that connects natively to BigQuery, was used to share those insights with Vente-Exclusive decision makers across different parts of the company. vente-exclusive-analyticssys

Results

Through its new analytics platform, Vente-Exclusive can obtain actionable business insights in minutes rather than hours or days. Updating these results in a dashboard used to take an average employee up to 2 days per week. Now it’s fully automated, and allows for a deeper and more cost-effective analysis of consumer behavior. And the company has set up a customer ranking and recommendation system, making its communication about products more personal while improving overall customer relations. Using BigQuery, Vente-Exclusive can better predict customer turnover and is able to contact and reactivate about 30% of members who were planning to leave.

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About Vente-Exclusive

About Datatonic

Datatonic, trusted by global players in the retail, finance and nonprofit sectors, has helped numerous companies access the power of cloud technologies and perform better through advanced analytics.