08: When data alone is not enough - Reinventing book shopping at Bookshop.org with Mason Stewart

In this week’s episode of The Data Stack Show, Kostas Pardalis and Eric Dodds chat with Mason Stewart, the lead engineer at Bookshop.org. Bookshop is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores. Their hope is to help strengthen the fragile ecosystem and margins around bookselling and keep local bookstores an integral part of our culture and communities.

Among other topics, today’s conversation talked about making what some might call boring decisions with the data stack that are better described as mature decisions and the intertwining of human interaction with data for problem solving and recommendations.

• Background on Mason and Bookshop.org (3:28)
• Technical challenges of keeping up with a rapidly expanding business (10:00)
• Interacting with data from fulfillment partners (14:36)
• Data schema for books and dealing with Elasticsearch (24:46)
• Human intervention in recognizing problems and exceptions (31:38)
• In-depth look at Bookshop’s data stack (37:06)
• Using curated lists from bookstores instead of algorithmic recommendations (43:50)

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.