PuppySpot

Online retailer PuppySpot sells happiness in the form of little furry bodies with wagging tails. Visit their website and be prepared for your productivity to drop. The company partners with a screened and vetted network of breeders who make the health and safety of all their dogs (not just puppies) a priority — no puppy mills, like those that supply the puppies for many brick-and-mortar pet stores.

When Analytics Manager Andrew Pafitis started at the company, he inherited a custom-built in-house ETL solution that relied on full-table replication for CRM, sales, and inventory data stored in a MySQL database, which took 4 to 6 hours to cycle through updates.

Pafitis considered several cloud ETL platforms to graduate from the legacy system. One was unnecessarily complex, another just too expensive, and a third didn't support binary log replication. But "Stitch's price point was great — it allowed us to ramp up at our own pace.

"By using Stitch, we were able to reduce the ETL lag from 6 hours to 5 minutes, and that allowed us to operationalize our data intraday. Now we can act on data sooner, and we have fewer discrepancies across tables from data not being equally up to date. Adding more integrations through Stitch, including Google Analytics and Google Ads, has helped us garner better insights into attribution and site conversion metrics."

Stitch is also part of PuppySpot's plans for the future. "In 2020 we're expecting to move to NetSuite and a new CRM system like Salesforce or something similar, so we'll be looking to expand our integrations with those data sources."

Bottom line: "Stitch does what it needs to do at an attractive price, and the interface is intuitive enough to allow me to manage everything on my own and scale up as we grow."