Ask HN: Business intelligence tools for e-commerce SaaS data reports

15 points by ta3411 3 years ago | 12 comments

Hi,

I am building a SaaS to help customers sell their products. Our data is stored in PostgresSQL with a pretty typical products/orders tables setup.

I want to build an internal dashboard for us to track GMV and external dashboards for customers to see their sale volumes with different date range and search filtering. All of this would be embedded in our user portal web dashboard built with ReactJS.

I am wondering which tools startups are using these days to help with this data indexing so we don't have to select all from our sql database. I have heard of metadabase.com and cube.dev but curious to see if anyone has any recommendations.

pea 3 years ago |

If you are comfortable writing Python, check out our open-source framework for creating data web apps: https://github.com/datapane/datapane.

It makes it simple to programmatically create serverless web apps from data, plots, and layout components, and you can embed them directly in your own product.

Here's an example of an e-commerce report: https://cloud.datapane.com/reports/dA9yQwA/e-commerce-report

seektable 3 years ago |

It depends on what kind of embedded reports you need. Most BI tools offer iFrame-based integration as simplest way to embed visuals into any kind of front-end.

Our BI tool (https://www.seektable.com) is often used as embedded BI with a very good value-for-money (about $250/mo for on-premise installation with white labeling). It is possible to embed individual reports, dashboards (that can contain custom visuals, your devs will like the approach) and even 'app view' (where users can make ad-hoc queries in a self-service manner).

Rodeoclash 3 years ago |

I'd vouch for Metabase. You can create charts that can be embedded fairly easily and the enterprise version allows you to create accounts with restricted access to datasets so it can be used by your customers in a self-service style.

I pair it with AirByte to fetch data from CSV files on S3 (generated hourly), a Salesforce instance and Google Analytics which is then assembled into a central data warehouse (also Postgres).

Both Metabase and Airbyte run nicely on Elastic Beanstalk. Airbase in particular is very easy to self host, maintain and upgrade.

tylerrobinson 3 years ago |

If you’re on AWS, QuickSight may be a good option. I am using it exactly as you are planning, with an internal view for us and external views for each customer to see their own data. It embeds into our React app.

cloudking 3 years ago |

Google Data Studio is pretty good for this use case. https://datastudio.google.com/

ta3411 3 years ago | |

Thank you for your reply. It seems to me datastudio helps you generate one-off reports? What I am looking for is more of an embedded solution for sellers to log into our dashboard and can slice and dice their data directly on our website.

cloudking 3 years ago | | |

The reports are interactive and update along with your data, you can slice and drill down as needed. They can also be embedded into your site. https://support.google.com/looker-studio/answer/7450249

You probably want these reports only available to specific sellers, you would be gated by Google auth... so if you're looking for a better embedded solution you may need to find something open source you can self-host.

jimmyechan 3 years ago |

Are you looking for open source tools specifically? If not, check out https://www.explo.co

garymlin 3 years ago | |

Hey co-founder of Explo here, would love to help out and give you a tour of Explo

vyrotek 3 years ago |

Our SaaS startup just integrated PowerBI Embedded to provide common and custom reports to our customers.

mstralka 3 years ago |

We use Metabase for our B2B SaaS app and it’s worked very well.

ivanvanderbyl 3 years ago | |

At my last company we embedded Metabase as a reporting UI for our customers. It worked reasonably well and licensing was straightforward.