Seemingly simple questions like “how many basic tees did we sell today?”, “what time of year do we sell the most leggings?”, or “what else has customer X bought and what kind of coupons can we send her?” are easy to answer when you have a single retail location and a small customer base. However, expand your operation to 200 worldwide brick and mortar retail stores, a robust e-commerce site, and a wholesale business, and connecting the dots can suddenly become a daunting, nearly impossible task. Learn more at http://infochimps.com

1. Major International Retailer
Finds Insight in Their Own Data
CASE STUDY
Seemingly simple questions like “how many basic tees did we sell
today?”, “what time of year do we sell the most leggings?”, or “what else
has customer X bought and what kind of coupons can we send her?”
are easy to answer when you have a single retail location and a small
customer base. However, expand your operation to 200 worldwide brick
and mortar retail stores, a robust e-commerce site, and a wholesale
business, and connecting the dots can suddenly become a daunting,
nearly impossible task.
We had all the
With millions of transactions daily, spread across multiple disconnected
data there, but legacy systems and IT teams, it feels impossible to see the full picture of
we didn’t the data. Finding the link in the total company sales, between in store
and online sales, can lead to deep insights into customer behavior and
discover its full overall company health, but often this information is so hard to pull
potential until together that the issue goes unaddressed. With the Infochimps
Platform, this retailer is able to bring together multiple streams of data
Infochimps! into one interface that allow people from around the organization, from
retail analysts to marketing managers to digital media analysts, to
- CEO, Retail Company answer a variety of valuable and formerly unfathomable questions.
Challenges
Retail stores typically run on legacy POS systems that batch update on
a daily basis and often do not communicate with each other, let alone
with a slick e-commerce site. For a marketing analyst trying to
understand the strength and health of their product or campaign,
reconciling these systems and their different data can be an impossible
task. While omni-channel retailing solutions do exist, they require both
store managers and web developers to learn entirely new systems,
racking up huge costs in time and money for company-wide training and
systems deployment. Teams become familiar with their different
technologies and ways of accessing data and re-skilling can be a
daunting task.
© 2012 Infochimps, Inc. All rights reserved. 1

2. CASE STUDY
Furthermore, accessing data in real time is not Big Data Benefits
often available, as systems hit scaling issues. Custom segmentation & micro-targeting
Want to know if a particular item is in stock in Customer groups vary from industry to industry
another nearby store? This information is often and there is no “one size fits all” solution. Our
not readily available and requires phone calls or client had a number of specialized questions to
other communication that add further time to a ask of their data and the power of the
transaction and potentially prevent an Infochimps Platform allowed them to make this
immediate sale from being made. a reality. Some of the questions that the
Platform enabled our retail client to answer:
If access to the data is even possible, there
may not be anything particularly rich or useful • How do we figure out which of our custom-
about it. Transaction data in its raw form only ers are more conservative and modify our
helps a company understand their sales, but display ads accordingly to meet their tastes?
not necessarily the connection between their With improved targeting of offers, our
sales and the weather, the demographics of the retail client was able to drive deeper
shoppers, the relationship of that shopper to loyalty in their customer base, putting
other purchases, the golden path to purchase, the right offers in front of the right
or other useful bits of information. people.
• How do we map in-store check-ins with
Solution Foursquare to in-store sales? Understand-
We implemented the Infochimps Platform in just ing the connection between social influence
one month and with minimal training because and purchase behavior can be a daunting
we did not have to rebuild the the retailer’s task. By using the Infochimps Platform to
systems from scratch. We brought together augment their sales data with Foursquare
multiple streams of data into one place, check-in data, our client was able to better
allowing the company’s marketing analysts, correlate in-store visits to sales and
store managers, C-level executives and other better understand and leverage insights
key stakeholders to ask the questions they in purchase behavior and social sharing.
wanted and easily return true answers to their • How can we tie web visits to our shoppers’
queries. The company’s internal teams got a locations? By augmenting the client’s
unified platform where they could ask questions weblogs with demographic and geographic
across the multiple sources, empowering them data from Infochimps Geo APIs, we were
with better analytics and insights to understand able to provide enhanced web segmenta-
their business. Furthermore, we helped give tion, enabling the retailer to get a clearer
their internal data context with augmenting picture of where their online shoppers
details from our data catalog. and purchasers physically reside.
© 2012 Infochimps, Inc. All rights reserved. 6

3. CASE STUDY
Managing Big Data at scale Integrated. Infochimps’ experience and tool
With traditional legacy systems, the amount of development in all the other aspects of Big
data collected can quickly become overwhelm- Data, from ingestion and conditioning to low-
ing and impossible to make useful. The friction delivery (in the form of our API
Infochimps Platform, with its Data Delivery platform), means that the team understands
Service (DDS) and Dashpot tools helps retailers and is equipped with the tools to successfully
augment their point of sale and online purchase navigate and troubleshoot the entire Big Data
data though a highly scalable system, perfected ecosystem of an organization.
tuned to handle the Big Data requirements of
retailers. Flexible Cost. The Infochimps, as well as a
number of other early-stage companies rely
The Infochimps Platform augments the retailer’s exclusively on IaaS (infrastructure as a service)
sales data on the fly, and enables the user to providers such as Amazon Web Services. This
visualize the results as they happen in a allows for all infrastructure costs to be operating
simple, easily configurable interface. The expenses (use what you need) and not capital
insights gained from these visualizations can expenditures (pay for infrastructure whether you
help retailers to more quickly iterate on target need it or not). Switching from CapEx to OpEx
offers that ultimately boost customer lifetime can dramatically lower the funding barrier to
value and deliver a more consistent customer adopting Big Data internally in an enterprise.
experience across channels.
Context. Perhaps best of all, the Infochimps
Infochimps is a powerful data system that Platform can be used to provide context to
ingests and delivers massive amounts of data enterprise’s internal data, whether through
while performing complex, resource-intensive public opinion mining (via social networks),
analytics along the way. Our unique technology geo-located information of many varieties, word
suite and best practices helps our retail clients corpus training for machine learning, and other
unlock the potential of the Big Data they already commonly useful (but difficult to accumulate)
have and of the even bigger data available data. All those capabilities combine to make us
online. a great choice for providing Big Data services
to the budget and process-conscious enterprise
Why Infochimps? customer.
Experienced. With years of experience in
stitching together multiple data streams into
cohesive, queryable APIs, Infochimps has
expertise to help organizations get value out of
their data faster.
© 2012 Infochimps, Inc. All rights reserved. 6

4. About Infochimps
Our mission is to make the world’s data more accessible.
Infochimps helps companies understand their data. We provide
tools and services that connect their internal data, leverage the
power of cloud computing and new technologies such as Hadoop,
and provide a wealth of external datasets, which organizations
can connect to their own data.
Contact Us
Infochimps, Inc.
1214 W 6th St. Suite 202
Austin, TX 78703
1-855-DATA-FUN (1-855-328-2386)
www.infochimps.com
info@infochimps.com
Twitter: @infochimps
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© 2012 Infochimps, Inc. All rights reserved. 8