E-commerce Analytics: Databricks, GenAI & 500M+ Events

Driving E-commerce Growth with a Scalable Analytics Platform on Databricks

Techwards partnered with a leading online marketplace to transform over half a billion raw event records (totaling 560+ GB) into actionable intelligence supporting 91 million user sessions and over 380 thousand SKUs through a robust, fully automated analytics platform built on Databricks Lakehouse. This modern, scalable system delivered near real-time business insight, improved conversion optimization, and empowered non-technical users to access insights instantly via GenAI-powered natural language queries.

Problem Statement

The client’s explosive growth in e-commerce operations created several barriers to data-driven decision-making:

The business generated millions of e-commerce events daily, totaling over half a billion records in just seven months, with data arriving in inconsistent formats and compressed files.
Raw event data presented ongoing data quality issues, including missing values and schema inconsistencies, which led to inaccurate reporting and excessive manual cleansing.
Siloed platforms and manual processes prevented unified views of millions of users, thousands of products, and critical sales metrics, hindering effective customer journey analytics and market basket analysis.
Slow, manual deployment cycles and a lack of automated orchestration delayed new features and slowed responsiveness to fast-moving e-commerce trends.
Business users were dependent on data teams for ad-hoc queries and insight, creating reporting bottlenecks and limiting the organization’s agility.

Solutions

Techwards delivered a comprehensive, Databricks-powered e-commerce analytics platform, addressing all major challenges and future-proofing the client’s data strategy:

Scalable Ingestion and Processing: The platform seamlessly ingested and processed half a billion raw events (560+ GB) using Databricks and Apache Spark, supporting daily ingestion and transformation at scale.
Robust Data Quality with Medallion Architecture: Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers progressively refined raw data into 20.5 GB of business-ready, cleansed analytical datasets, with Gold layer aggregates powering direct consumption by BI dashboards.
Fully Automated CI/CD and Orchestration: With Databricks Asset Bundles and GitHub Actions, full environment deployment including orchestration and job refresh, completed in under 47 seconds, and full pipeline executions completed in less than 50 minutes.
Comprehensive Business Intelligence Dashboards: The solution delivered executive-ready dashboards, supporting KPI monitoring of 385 million+ views, 19.1 million add-to-carts, 6.85 million checkouts, and $2.06 billion in revenue analyzed. Session analysis included 91 million+ sessions, an average of 4.23 views per session, and $23 average revenue per session.
GenAI-Powered Self-Service Analytics: Integrated a Genie natural language querying interface within Databricks, enabling business stakeholders to ask questions like “Show me the top 10 brands by revenue last quarter” or “What were monthly conversion rates?” and instantly receive visualized, actionable results removing the need for direct analyst intervention.

Outcome

Techwards’ solution produced measurable business value, driving transformational impact:

Data Processing Efficiency: Transformed the ingestion and processing of over half a billion records from a complex, manual process to a refined Gold layer available in under 50 minutes.
Accelerated Time-to-Insight: Near real-time dashboard updates drastically improved business agility, reducing reporting bottlenecks and supporting rapid response to emerging trends.
Agility and Scalability: Automated CI/CD cut deployment times to seconds and positioned the platform to scale with future growth in data volume, SKUs, or user activity.
Democratization of Analytics: GenAI-powered querying enabled all business users to access critical KPIs, customer, product, and engagement insights directly improving data-driven decisions and freeing analysts for higher-value work.
Strategic Outcomes: Unified analysis provided deep visibility into user engagement, cohort-based retention, market basket patterns, and conversion optimization, directly informing successful cross-sell strategies, campaign refinement, and operational planning.

This project exemplifies Techwards’ expertise in building robust, scalable e-commerce data platforms, leveraging the Databricks Lakehouse, automated engineering, and GenAI to empower business growth in the modern data economy.