How Cart.com accelerated time-to-market with Powered by Airbyte

The Challenge

Cart.com helps its customers sell everywhere and fulfill everywhere. Customers leverage the platform for use cases in fulfillment & logistics, analytics, commerce software (feed marketing, marketplace management, & ecommerce storefront), commerce services (growth marketing, customer engagement, & ecommerce/marketplace optimization). 

Cart’s unified analytics is an essential aspect to enabling merchants to predict demand, allocate inventory and adjust ad-spend using multi-touch attribution. These insights are derived from the merchant's data spread across their various business tools. Examples include Facebook, Shopify, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Google Ads, Google Analytics and more. This data is then consolidated and harmonized into Cart’s Snowflake data warehouse, prior to insights and metrics being generated. The integration and data movement into Snowflake is Powered by Airbyte behind the scenes. Cart.com’s data products are also featured in the Powered by Snowflake program and Google Cloud Marketplace. 

Getting the data into Cart wasn’t always easy.

“Cart considered acquiring another company to solve our foundational ELT needs and bootstrap our data products line. After due diligence, we decided it wasn't part of our core value proposition. It was better to partner with Airbyte, rather than take on this burden ourselves. Ever since, we've been able to focus on transformative innovation in the retail data space, rather than ELT." - Chase Zieman, Chief Data Officer, Cart.com

Outside of solution providers, other workarounds included writing custom scripts in Python, but this was not as consistent, reliable or scalable as Airbyte. These are all factors that make it harder to offer a fully-fledged product that can be used in a self-serve fashion by customers. 

“A major pain for any engineer is data extraction. Creating pipelines and getting the data where it needs to be to create useful insights & analytics. We use Airbyte as our partner on this, and that has always provided us with relief.” - Victor Olade, Director of Data Engineering, Cart.com

The Solution

What appealed to Cart about Powered by Airbyte is that it gave them time back to focus on developing their core product. They didn’t want to worry about connector work, and could focus on Cart’s proprietary data analytics. Cart needed to power end-user authentication and end-user data movement. This would enable a product-led growth model, with Cart’s customers connecting their data sources in a self-serve manner. Customers could sign themselves up for an account, connect their integrations, and begin using the product on their own.

Powered by Airbyte enables teams to add hundreds of integrations to their product instantly. End-users can authenticate into their data sources and begin syncing data to any product, all on their own. This enables engineering teams to focus on what makes their product great, rather than maintaining integrations and ELT pipelines.

“Enabling the end-user and empowering them to create their connections by simply entering a few value fields - that's huge.”  - Victor Olade, Director of Data Engineering, Cart.com

Cart has a second use case for Airbyte as well. Cart has a tremendous amount of first party data due to their vast ecosystem of platform software offerings and has grown over the years through acquisition. Prior to acquisitions being fully integrated into our backend, we can leverage airbyte to perform change data capture (cdc) at scale and integrate acquisitions in days after close of deal, not months. A great example of this is the movement of data from our proprietary warehouse management software to our data warehouse enabling advancements in tech enabled logistics for our brands.  They use Airbyte to circulate data across the Cart ecosystem of products.

“We're injecting data from the fulfillment part of our business, and that's housed in a Postgres database and there was already a well-supported Postgres connector. It was easy. You could just stand up another connector and ingest data to Snowflake. We could do it ourselves. But you know, then it takes more effort, something to maintain, something to monitor. And this way just fits into the existing Airbyte platform, and everything's already supported.” - Ron Smith, Director of Software Engineering, Cart.com

The Results

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Cart’s product in-action

Cart saved significant time by leveraging Airbyte with very little investment or maintenance, “We would have to build everything from scratch. It definitely saved us a significant amount of time and got us to market sooner.”  - Victor Olade, Director of Data Engineering, Cart.com

Additionally, an edge over the competition was gained by getting to market sooner through leveraging Airbyte.

“Our competitors invested in building their own connectors. We got to skip all of that, since Airbyte has already spent years building a huge catalog of connectors. Airbyte helped us accelerate our progress by years, compared to our competitors. We don’t need to worry about connectors and focus on creating value for our users instead of building infrastructure. That’s priceless. The time and energy saved allows us to disrupt and grow faster.” - Chase Zieman, Chief Data Officer, Cart.com

Cart was an early design partner for Airbyte. Both companies got their start in 2020 and together have ridden a rocketship of growth, side-by-side. Cart was an early adopter of Airbyte offerings such as enterprise-level support and has provided invaluable product feedback throughout the course of the partnership. Both companies look forward to a continued partnership well in to the future.

What's Next

Cart will continue to expand its usage of Airbyte in the future. Cart uses Airbyte to connect to many third party data sources for brands, as often as possible. For any source not yet available in the Airbtye Catalog, the Cart team works with the Custom Connector toolkit to convert it to an Airbyte source.  This allows them to move quickly, thereby adding value for brands!

All case study readers are eligible for a free trial of Cart’s Unified Analytics. Experience first-hand a product that is Powered by Airbyte.

To learn more about how Powered by Airbyte can reduce your engineering burden, and accelerate time to market, visit the website!

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