April 10, 2026
The company runs a large online auction platform and shopping website that connects buyers and sellers in over 190 countries. Their website has millions of sellers with 1.9 billion global listings and over 132 million active buyers.
THE CHALLENGE
The key stakeholders of different business units (BUs) received an automated weekly insight report that contained key performance indicators (KPIs) related to all the BUs. While this weekly insight report provided the decision makers with a high-level overview of the performance of the different BUs, the given metrics were not tailored to providing advanced insights.
The primary stakeholders in the Seller Experience BU needed a separate report which included an additional 20 metrics to track their performance at a detailed level. This report was manually compiled by different team members and sent out every week, to supplement the automated weekly insights report. Over a period of time, the number of KPIs in this second Seller Experience insights report kept growing, which increased the cumulative manual effort on a weekly basis.
The Seller Experience BU needed an analytics partner to build an automated insights engine that would incorporate a total of 48 KPIs into a single report which would be sent out every Monday morning over email. This updated report would include charts for all the metrics, including 7 day moving averages, with links to the existing Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards on which the users could drill down for even further insights.
THE SOLUTION
The Prescience team analysed the existing automated and manually prepared weekly insight reports, as well as the user requirements for business metrics which were currently not included. There were existing data pipelines that were executed daily or weekly for the metrics which were already part of the two reports. The team designed and built an insights database which consolidated the data on the domain, data owner, KPI, business SPOC, data SPOC, data latency etc.
To build the automated email delivery system, the team created an Administrator account in Microsoft Outlook. The modular solution allows the team to add data and templates to the respective folders. For some KPIs like Late Delivery Rate, a lower number indicated better performance, and hence these were tagged as inverted, so that the trend analysis and charts would correctly depict the positive or negative changes. Using a job scheduler, the summarized seller experience comparison insights are sent out weekly to all the relevant stakeholders.
The new comprehensive Seller Experience insights report includes a Big Movers table that contains the consolidated view of the week on week (WoW) changes for each section, along with section wise tables. It also contains the details of the current week, last week, WoW changes, year on year (YoY) changes, data availability and data maturity. Users who click on any of these metrics will be redirected to the 7 day moving averages trend charts. From there, they can access the BI dashboards which provide the ability to drill down to the required details.
The different technologies used for this engagement included,
- SQL
- Python
- Microsoft Outlook
- HTML
THE IMPACT
With the new automated insights engine, the company is able to save 1,250 hours of manual effort per annum. This allows business users and analysts to focus on more business critical activities. The modular solution allows the team to append new KPIs and then generate the weekly report, with minimal rework.
This end to end insights engine can now be used as a base framework that can be easily deployed in other BUs, where there are similar levels of repeated manual effort which can be automated.
