How 1mg uses RudderStack to capture unlimited behavioral data

1mg is India’s leading online pharmacy and healthcare platform

Challenges

• Cost-based limitations on capturing all their event volume
• Secure, compliant data collection to meet healthcare regulations
• Efficient data discovery across different teams within the organization
• Leveraging real-time event data for personalization and other use-cases

Results

• Capturing unlimited event data without cost concern
• Implemented a fully regulatory-compliant customer data collection solution on their own VPC
• Collecting better-quality data for customer and product analytics, allowing them to implement personalization and other analytics-derived features

1mg’s Data Stack

• Data Collection and Synchronization:
  RudderStack SDKs, custom scripts
• Data QA:
  RudderStack Data Governance API
• Data Transformation and Enrichment:
  SQL, RudderStack Transformations, AWS Athena
• Data Warehouse & Data Lake:
  Amazon Redshift & Amazon S3
• BI & Cloud Toolset:
  Google Analytics, Lotame
• Job Orchestration:
  Apache Kafka

1mg's data challenges

1mg is a leading Indian online pharmacy and healthcare platform that provides online medical consultations and healthcare services to millions of users. Their previous CDP vendor charged by data volume. As a result, collecting all of their customer data became prohibitively expensive.

They also faced a major challenge ensuring secure customer data collection that complied with the healthcare regulations they operate under.

Unlimited Data Capture

As one of India’s largest online pharmacies, 1mg generates terabytes of data every day. To collect and harness this data, they implemented a customer data platform (CDP). But their CDP vendor charged by event volume, forcing them to pick and choose the event data they wanted to capture. Because 1mg is a fully data-driven company, this created a huge problem.

To solve this problem, 1mg’s data team implemented RudderStack. RudderStack’s warehouse-first architecture built their customer data lake on their data warehouse, allowing them to capture all of their real-time customer event data and enable access to it for all of their teams at a significantly lower cost than they were paying with their previous CDP vendor.

• 1mg leverages RudderStack Event Stream to capture real-time event data across their website, mobile apps, and server-side sources.
• 1mg tracks user behavior across their website and mobile apps, by collecting real-time customer event data using RudderStack’s web(JavaScript) and mobile(Android and iOS) SDKs.
• Then they use Event Stream to send this data directly to their third-party analytics tools for customer and product insights as well as marketing use-cases.

Secure, Compliant Data Collection

Healthcare regulations around data collection and storage complicated 1mg’s CDP implementation because their previous vendor stored 1mg’s customer data in their own infrastructure on the cloud. The CDP wasn’t hosted in a geographically-compliant location though. As a result, 1mg’s data team was severely limited in the types of data they could capture and utilize.

With RudderStack, 1mg is no longer limited in the types of data they can collect and use, because RudderStack is deployed on their own VPC, resulting in a fully compliant, fully-owned solution.

Better Quality Data for Effective Personalization

RudderStack enables 1mg’s engineering team to collect unlimited high-quality data across every data source. It also allows them to equip every team with this data by routing it to their 3rd party tools or enabling access to it directly on their data warehouse for analysis. This enables a number of use cases:

Product Managers

Product managers use this data to understand how users are interacting with various aspects of the product.

Marketing Teams

Marketing teams can build user cohorts and set up cost-effective user acquisition and retention strategies.

Data Science

Data science builds and refines their product recommendation system, allowing their teams to deliver relevant and highly personalized product offerings and advertisements to their customers in real-time.

1mg Data Stack

Sources: Android, iOS, AMP

Destinations: Apache Kafka, Facebook Pixel, Firebase, Fullstory, Google Analytics

Data Lake: Amazon S3