Tracking Real-Time Customer Journey using Snowpipe at GlobalMart

Learning Objectives
Overview
GlobalMart, a fast-growing e-commerce company, was losing customers to competitors who seemed to "read their minds" in real-time. While GlobalMart analyzed yesterday's customer behavior, their rivals were responding to what customers were doing right now — offering instant recommendations, preventing cart abandonment within minutes, and personalizing experiences based on live browsing patterns. The solution? Implementing streaming data analytics to capture and analyze every customer action as it happens.
In this project, you'll follow GlobalMart's transformation from batch-based historical analytics to real-time customer intelligence. You'll learn how to:
- Build auto-ingesting data pipelines that process customer actions continuously
- Set up Snowpipe for automatic data loading without manual intervention
- Handle streaming data with flexible schemas using VARIANT data types
- Analyze real-time customer behavior patterns and conversion funnels
This project isn't just about moving data faster — it's about fundamentally changing how businesses understand and respond to customer behavior. You'll discover how real-time data enables instant personalization, immediate cart abandonment prevention, and live competitive intelligence that drives revenue growth.
If you want to master streaming data engineering and learn how modern e-commerce companies achieve real-time customer insights, this project will teach you the skills that separate advanced data engineers from the rest.
Prerequisites
- Experience with Snowflake data warehouse concepts including external stages, file formats, and storage integrations
- Knowledge of cloud storage platforms such as Azure Data Lake Storage, AWS S3, or GCP Storage for staging streaming data files
- Familiarity with VARIANT data types for handling flexible JSON/Parquet schemas and extracting nested data structures
- Knowledge of timestamp handling and data type conversions for processing real-time event data