How SamCart Achieved New Levels of Consistency, Efficiency, and Performance with Cube

SamCart is an eCommerce platform powering over 75,000 creators worldwide, supporting digital sellers, creators, and entrepreneurs with a seamless, conversion-focused checkout solution. SamCart’s platform is designed to help its users increase conversion rates with minimal friction, delivering an eCommerce experience that aligns with the fast-paced needs of modern digital businesses.

SamCart provides customers with an in-app dashboard displaying the key metrics and reports these sellers and entrepreneurs need to be successful in running their business. This becomes the source-of-truth and most relied upon aspect of SamCart’s dashboard for understanding the health of their business. It is critical that this dashboard updates regularly and maintains accurate information.

SamCart’s Mason Tiffin, a data engineer specialized in modernizing data platforms, shares their story.

Supporting the Growing Demand for Data

As SamCart’s customer base expanded, so did the demand for accurate and quick access to data on the client-facing reporting platform. One of the most pressing challenges was centralizing and standardizing core data models to ensure consistency across reports, a critical need for SamCart’s worldwide user community.

Additionally, performance issues began to surface as dashboards often took too long to load, and customers increasingly reported data discrepancies, leading to confusion and frequent support requests. These challenges hindered SamCart’s ability to deliver an optimal customer experience, impacting the overall perception of the brand and adding strain on customer support teams, who had to handle numerous data export requests to meet customer needs.

Evolving SamCart’s Data Stack with Cube Cloud

Fortunately, SamCart’s Chief Architect had prior experience with Cube in other projects. Determined to improve the user experience and streamline data access, SamCart turned to Cube’s universal semantic layer, seeking a solution that could centralize and govern their data processes while also accelerating query execution times.

The primary goals were to ensure scalability, flexibility, and high performance to accommodate SamCart’s growing customer base and evolving data needs. Their requirements focused on answering three key questions:

• Can the system properly scale to handle all requests efficiently?
• Can the system evolve as data needs and data stack evolve?
• Can the system provide sub second query performance for large data sets?

Implementing Cube’s solution was a multi-stage process. In the first phase, SamCart connected Cube to their MySQL database and centralized data models. With the data models defined in Cube Cloud, they could begin defining pre-aggreations, which provided an immediate boost in query performance and significantly improved load times. However, as their data volumes and customer expectations grew, they recognized the need for a more robust solution because MySQL’s throughput became limiting.

The second phase involved transitioning to Snowflake as the data source and using dbt Labs for data transformations, allowing SamCart to simplify their data architecture. With MySQL data models defined in Cube Cloud, the migration was as easy as pointing to the new Snowflake instance, making the work they had already done for MySQL available to the new cloud data platform.

In addition to performance, the team had to address the complexity in having customers in almost every timezone globally for serving pre-aggregations. Initially, they considered consolidating time zones into regions, but they ultimately decided to offload timezone conversions to Snowflake and dbt Labs, which enabled Cube to deliver consistent data while optimizing resources.

This move enabled them to shift heavy workloads to Snowflake, allowing Cube to focus on building pre-aggregations, which drastically reduced pre-aggregation build times from eight minutes to mere seconds by leveraging Cube Cloud’s export buckets. This enhancement not only accelerated the testing and development cycles. In addition, SamCart realized cost savings from reducing the number of direct Snowflake queries and provided their customers with faster access to data at the same time.

Mason shared, “The main integration Cube has is to Snowflake. Snowflake is at the heart of our data platform so all sources and data builds occur in Snowflake. Cube Cloud has been nice because it allows us to extend the features and functionality we love about Snowflake.”

Achieving New Levels of Consistency, Efficiency, and Performance

With Cube’s universal semantic layer now seamlessly integrated into their Snowflake infrastructure, SamCart gained powerful new capabilities that transformed their data operations. Pre-aggregations, a standout feature of Cube, allowed SamCart to reduce query execution times significantly, with some queries dropping from 20 seconds to as little as 1.1 seconds, achieving an average of 600 milliseconds.

This impressive performance gain translated into an enhanced user experience, with customers enjoying dashboards that now load in sub-second times. The reduction in load times also cut down on support requests related to performance, allowing the team to focus on more complex inquiries.

Cube’s integration brought new levels of consistency to SamCart’s data operations. By centralizing their data model and streamlining complex data logic, Cube improved data accuracy across reports and simplified the data development process. The enhanced oversight and logging features in Cube Cloud enabled the SamCart team to quickly identify optimization opportunities and address any data issues, fostering a more efficient and reliable data environment.

Looking Ahead

Cube’s universal semantic layer has enabled SamCart to deliver a faster, more consistent, and reliable data experience for their customers. The improvements in performance and data governance not only reduced customer complaints but also allowed SamCart to shift its focus toward delivering advanced analytics solutions. As SamCart continues to grow, Cube will remain a key partner in their data journey, helping them drive greater insights and create a seamless experience for the digital sellers, creators, and entrepreneurs they support.

With a solid foundation in place, SamCart plans to expand its use of Cube, incorporating additional dashboards and reports to further enhance the insights available to its customers. As they evolve from primarily descriptive analytics toward diagnostic and predictive analytics, SamCart envisions Cube Cloud playing an instrumental role in managing and delivering high-quality, real-time data to their customers.