Decathlon, based in France, is the largest sporting goods retailer in the world with upwards of 1,697 stores across 60 countries and regions. Currently working to grow its business in the US, and knowing it had to adjust the strategy it uses in Europe, Decathlon needed to revisit its plan and do more testing to figure out the right approach for the US market.
The team at Decathlon was using Glew for business intelligence, but it quickly became evident the tool was not meeting the team’s needs. Tony Leon, chief technology officer for Decathlon USA, and the team turned to ShopifyQL Notebooks. As the product continues to evolve, Leon is confident that it will be able to replace all exports in the future. “It’s so much easier to refresh data directly in a live environment rather than having to constantly extract data and format it,” he says.
ShopifyQL Notebooks has helped Decathlon bring together and analyze the data it needs to make viable business decisions quickly and efficiently.
“In Notebooks, we can easily see year-over-year numbers on a graph and combine multiple Key Performance Indicators (KPI) into one report which is very useful,” says Leon. “Running reports in Notebooks allows us to go through them quickly without having to have multiple tabs open. We can also easily keep track of peaks or drops in sales and quickly compare numbers from one timeframe to the other.” It’s a far more scalable and dynamic way to explore, understand and interpret data. “Being able to quickly query things, see trends, visualize the data, and clear up questions is potentially the most valuable aspect of (ShopifyQL) Notebooks."
Giving more people in the company the ability to change one or more parameters within a report, or to query data themselves in a safe environment, is a huge time-saver as well, Leon points out. “We can remember what has been done in the past, adding, for example, decisions that have been made or budget that was invested, and easily revisit the data so we can always keep track of important patterns regardless of what we remember or if certain employees have moved on.”
ShopifyQL Notebooks makes it easy to filter and narrow down to exactly what you’re looking for with quick access to the data you need. Leon estimates that reporting is at least 50 percent quicker with ShopifyQL Notebooks.
Ready-to-use templates can be added directly to a Notebook (an individual exploration) or customized for a specific time range. “Start with a template. You will see that it will give you at least 60 percent of the answers you’re looking for. We can use the templates to get more familiar with the environment and our data, and then we can do more of our own queries. Notebooks truly allows you to get off on the right foot,” Leon says.
With ShopifyQL Notebooks, Decathlon saw results fast:
- 50% faster reporting
- 60% faster data analysis through ready-to-use reporting templates
- A more holistic view of the business through enhanced data exploration, analysis, and storytelling capabilities
Without using ShopifyQL Notebooks, I would have done an extract in Google Sheets or Excel, and maybe critiqued some private tables, and delivered it to leadership for comment. The problem with that is it's just one shot. It's out of date. That’s why we use Notebooks—it’s specifically adapted to all of our data mining and storytelling needs as an ecommerce brand.
