In the rapidly evolving eCommerce landscape, data is no longer a luxury—it’s the backbone of smarter decision-making. For digitally savvy founders, employees, and shareholders of eCommerce and retail brands, leveraging data effectively has become critical to staying competitive. Yet, the journey from raw data to actionable insights is a complex, time-intensive process, requiring expertise and infrastructure that can be overwhelming and expensive to build and maintain in-house.
At Leaf, we specialize in making this complexity manageable, helping brands unlock the full potential of their data through streamlined performance marketing, optimised website conversion rates, and smarter decision-making. Let’s explore why data engineering is at the heart of these outcomes, and how we’re making advanced solutions more accessible than ever.
Laying the Foundations: Why Data Engineering Comes First
Before brands can extract valuable insights from their data, a robust data infrastructure must be in place. This involves:
- Building Data Lakes: Central repositories that store vast amounts of structured and unstructured data.
- Data Pipelines: Systems to collect, process, and transport data efficiently from multiple sources.
- ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Processes: Preparing raw data for analysis by cleaning and standardizing it.
- Schemas and Architecture: Defining how data is organised, accessed, and stored to ensure consistency and scalability.
At Leaf, we handle tens of gigabytes of data and over 2,000 tables—to ensure comprehensive insights for our clients. Additionally, our tailored approach, the Leaf Schema, is designed to flexibly accommodate data from sources as varied as Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Meta, Google, TikTok, Klaviyo, Brightpearl and Inventory Planner. By integrating their data into our schema, brands can focus on what truly matters instead of struggling to stitch together disparate datasets themselves.
Without these elements, advanced analytics and data science are impossible. Yet, constructing this foundation demands significant time, resources, and technical expertise—challenges that many eCommerce brands aren’t equipped to tackle alone.
Reducing Costs: Making Data Science Commercially Accessible
Once the infrastructure is built, the next challenge is managing the cost of data processing and storage. Storing and analyzing every piece of historical data can become prohibitively expensive, especially when using off-the-shelf tools that often come with unnecessary features and blanket metrics.
At Leaf, we’ve tackled this problem by:
- Selective Data Processing: Applying a meticulous approach to determine which data is truly valuable, so we don’t waste resources on irrelevant metrics.
- Custom Pipelines: While off-the-shelf tools can be fast to implement, they’re often costlier in the long run due to a lack of control over what data is processed. By defining exactly what data we need through our Leaf Schema, we’ve reduced the initial monthly cost of our ETL tools by 50%. The underlined design of the Leaf Schema ensures cost efficiency and improved control over the data processing pipeline. Custom pipelines take longer to build but are more cost-efficient and precise, enabling us to process only the data that matters.
- Innovative Infrastructure Optimization: Through advanced techniques and proprietary methodologies (our secrets!), we’ve significantly reduced the cost of data processing and storage, passing these savings on to our clients.
This commitment to efficiency doesn’t just reduce costs; it empowers eCommerce brands with timely access to better data management, allowing them to invest more in strategies that drive growth.
Smarter Insights with Tailored Performance Intelligence
Traditional business intelligence tools, while helpful, often fall short of delivering actionable insights tailored to the specific needs of eCommerce brands. Tools with generic features—many of which go unused—can become operationally inefficient and financially wasteful.
Our solution? Answers, Leaf’s performance intelligence platform. Built with a surgical precision approach, Answers delivers insights tailored to your business, cutting through the noise of unnecessary features. Everything we develop aligns with our guiding principles:
- Save Time: Automate workflows and reduce manual analysis, so teams can focus on strategy.
- Smarter Decisions: Provide measurable, clear, actionable insights for optimising paid marketing spend, website performance, and customer experience.
- Drive Revenue: Leverage data to identify and capitalise on growth opportunities.
Unlike one-size-fits-all solutions, Answers empowers eCommerce brands to make better decisions faster, improving ROI from paid marketing and eCommerce management.
Time To Value
Building and maintaining a robust data infrastructure, optimising costs, and delivering actionable insights require not just expertise, but also time—time many eCommerce brands can’t afford to spare. By partnering with Leaf, brands gain access to cutting-edge tools and services that transform raw data into a powerful decision-making engine.
Our proven methodologies and advanced technologies, like Answers, ensure that every piece of data works harder and smarter for your business. We make the complex simple, the inaccessible affordable, and the overwhelming manageable—all with the ultimate goal of improving your marketing and website performance while driving business growth.
The Future of Data-Driven eCommerce
In today’s competitive market, the brands that thrive are those that harness data effectively to drive smarter decisions. At Leaf, we’re dedicated to making this possible for eCommerce retailers of all sizes. By building scalable, cost-efficient data solutions, we help brands unlock their full potential, reduce costs, and make performance intelligence commercially accessible.
With Leaf, the path to smarter decision-making isn’t just a possibility—it’s a reality. Let us handle the complexity so you can focus on what you do best: growing your brand.