E-commerce website traffic is hard earned. That’s why merchants need to do their best to avoid lost sales from abandoned online shopping carts, and why they need to target shoppers who browse but ultimately buy elsewhere. Ryzeo helps e-tailers beat the odds and achieve double-digit revenue increases with the company’s digital behavioral marketing solutions.

Ryzeo leverages real-time data generated by events on its clients’ e-commerce websites, such as what a shopper views and searches for, to make AI-driven recommendations through website “suggested items” widgets and customized emails. The company can quickly present personalized offers and follow-up messaging to potential buyers thanks to a high-performance data platform underpinned by DataStax.

The Challenge

For many years, California-based Ryzeo has relied on DataStax Enterprise, a cloud-native NoSQL database built on Apache Cassandra®. “We found Cassandra to be the best solution, with much less latency for database write operations compared to alternatives,” says Waheed Iqbal, Ryzeo’s Head of Networking and Systems. The active-everywhere architecture helps ensure high availability with enterprise-grade security, monitoring, and support backed by DataStax.

Data platform reliability and performance are important because Ryzeo sends 500,000 emails a month in the form of newsletters and automated email sequences that are customized depending on which brands, products, or merchandise categories a shopper has browsed, searched, put in a cart, or purchased. “We have to reliably capture every event that comes in. We can't afford to drop any events. If we lost some of that data, that would mean revenue-generating email sequences going unsent that would cost our clients money,” says Ryzeo COO Russell Miller.

Over time, Ryzeo’s success in converting online browsers into buyers attracted more clients, requiring the company to handle even greater volumes of e-commerce event data. Eventually, disk space on the company’s hardware began running low. In response, Ryzeo explored options for efficiently scaling its data platform. Because managing hardware was becoming too much for the company’s IT team to handle, it focused on hosted solutions.

The Solution

“We initially looked at Cassandra possibilities and alternatives with AWS, but these were expensive. Instaclustr was also costly,” says Iqbal. “We explored having virtual machines in the cloud and still managing our own cluster of DataStax Enterprise, but then we learned more about DataStax Astra DB, which gives us the managed service we wanted at a price comparable to deploying VMs ourselves.”

With the database-as-a-service approach using Astra DB, Ryzeo can seamlessly scale to support business development growth and traffic bursts, without constant concerns about keeping its Cassandra environment properly sized and up to date. “Now we can focus more attention on our business, instead of managing Cassandra clusters,” Iqbal says.

The Results

Ryzeo’s IT team can now dedicate more time to developing new features and improvements to help clients finely target prospects via data-driven intelligence. Astra DB helps shorten the team’s development cycles with a microservice and API-first architecture built on Kubernetes. The data API gateway streamlines developers’ use of schemaless JSON, REST, and GraphQL, eliminating drivers and the need to learn Cassandra Query Language (CQL).

Ryzeo’s fine-grained system for product recommendations, customer segmentation, and message targeting helps put the right product in front of buyers at the right time—before they purchase from another merchant. As a result, Ryzeo’s clients see response rates that are ten times higher than they would be otherwise, with average email open rates of 40 percent and conversion rates of three to six percent.

The behavioral marketing operations depend on rapid database performance, and Astra DB delivers with database writes in under 20 milliseconds. “We clock around 200 database reads and 200 writes on average per second. If we didn't have DataStax to reliably catch all the data events we are throwing and write them to the database fast, our business couldn’t function,” says Miller.

By enabling clients to swiftly personalize recommendations and follow-ups to the 95 percent of shoppers who look at a product but don’t add it to their cart in the same visit, Ryzeo has a dramatic impact on sales. “On average, our clients see a total revenue increase of between eight and ten percent. The data we have suggests that our recommendation widget on a client’s website can increase sales up to another 30 percent,” Miller says.

The company’s recommendation widget, currently in beta, is just one new business opportunity made possible by smarter, faster use of data with DataStax. “Building our business on DataStax has been instrumental to our growth,” says Miller. “By unlocking exciting possibilities with rapid ingestion and analysis of data, we’re helping e-commerce merchants large and small compete against industry giants.”