If you’re writing Python code in a Jupyter notebook that is eventually going to be used in production, it’s sensible to consider how long it takes to run. This is...
When working with ecommerce and marketing data in time series analysis projects, the dates of national holidays, or bank holidays, can make a big difference to customer behaviour so are...
The zipfile module in Python provides a way to compress files and directories into a single zip file. This is useful for reducing the size of files and directories that...
When working with Python you’ll often need to access files and directories on your computer. Python includes a useful os module that gives you access to your computer or server’s...
The QR code, or Quick Response Code, works by encoding data in a two-dimensional barcode. It is a type of matrix barcode, which is a two-dimensional barcode that uses a...
GitLab is one of the most widely used project management tools in software development and data science. It’s similar to Jira and similar systems in that it provides a useful...
Pillow is a fork of the Python Imaging Library (PIL) and is one of the most useful Python tools for resizing images. Pillow can actually perform a very wide range...
If you regularly watch YouTube videos that you want to listen to on your drive to work, you could consider downloading them and converting them to MP3. This is done...
In ecommerce, you’ll typically be given a revenue target your site needs to hit every month. In my experience, these revenue targets are often proposed by finance directors, CEOs, or...
When working with Python lists you’ll often encounter times when you need to remove duplicate values present in a single list, remove duplicates found in multiple lists, or identify the...
The QR code or Quick Response code is a two-dimensional or matrix barcode invented in the early nineties by a Japanese car manufacturer. QR codes started to become popular in...
When creating business reports or running queries against a database or web analytics platform in a business setting, you’ll often need to know the start and end dates of the...
In ecommerce and marketing it’s relatively common to use ISO week numbers when reporting data. The ISO week system is a leap week calendar that forms part of the ISO...
Alongside the Python list, the dictionary is the most commonly used data storage structure in Python. Dictionaries allow you to store numeric and text-based data as a series of key-value...
Exceptions are events that can modify the flow of control through a Python application and are triggered when errors occur. When writing production code it’s a good idea to both...
Pip is a command line application that allows you to install, upgrade, and remove Python packages from your development environment using simple commands. It works just like the Aptitude or...
Dropbox is one of the most widely used file storage and file sharing platforms and is used by a wide variety of businesses. Dropbox has put the effort into building...
While Mailchimp is best known for its email marketing functionality, it also includes an excellent transactional email API designed to allow developers to send transactional emails from their applications.
If you regularly work with time series data, one common thing you’ll need to do is add and subtract days from a date. If you tried doing this by hand,...
Mailchimp is one of the most widely used email service providers (or ESPs) in ecommerce and marketing. Since it is popular with those who only need its basic campaign features,...
In ecommerce, email marketing remains one of the most effective (and cost-effective) digital marketing techniques, especially when combined with data science techniques. The vast amounts of customer data generated in...
The eBay Finding API gives you direct access to eBay search listings using a simple SDK. This API lets you search or query eBay to fetch specific search listings for...
Subscription commerce was all the rage for a while, but it’s not really become as popular as many in ecommerce perhaps envisaged. While we may have subscriptions for certain things,...
If you want to change careers and move into the data science or data mining field, as either a data scientist or a data engineer, or simply improve your skills,...
RSS feeds have been a mainstay on the web for over 20 years now. These XML-based documents are generated by web servers and designed to be read in RSS feed...
Although I have never really considered myself a technical SEO, I do need to do quite a bit of SEO work as part of my role as an Ecommerce Director....
Internal linking helps improve the user experience by recommending related content to users, which both reduces bounce rate, and helps search engine optimisation efforts. While there are no hard and...
EcommerceTools makes it really quick and easy to scrape Google search engine results in Python. In this simple project, we’ll use EcommerceTools to search Google for your chosen keywords, use...
Whether you’re analysing content written in other languages using Natural Language Processing, or you want to assist your content team by translating their writing into other languages, machine translating software...
If you’ve never heard of Spintax, you’ll definitely be aware of its typical usages. This text string replacement “language” is most commonly used for text spinning or article spinning, but...
The Google Autocomplete feature, or Google Suggest as it was previously known, has become a part of everyday life for us all. Start typing a search term into Google, and...
In B2B ecommerce, there are two main approaches to new customer acquisition: you either rely on your website to acquire customers for you, or you target specific customers through sales...
One quick and easy way to understand the size of a website, and its growth rate, is to examine the number of its web pages Google has indexed. You can...
Successful operations management is crucial to the overall growth of an ecommerce business. While those in ecommerce, marketing, or data science, can work together the sales coming in and encourage...
Marketers can be just as obsessive about data as data scientists, so there are an abundance of well-researched marketing metrics available for analysing marketing performance. Most of the commonly used...
Customers are expensive to acquire but generate more and more profit as time goes on. Providing you nurture them, treat them kindly, and apologise and fix any mistakes that occur,...
Category management is a retail technique that breaks down a company’s product range into groups of related items, such as categories, or subcategories, or by their product type. By running...
The Google Knowledge Graph database includes an astronomical amount of data on almost every topic you can think of, allowing Google to create Knowledge Panels and infoboxes that summarise search...
Most very large datasets tend to get compressed on servers to preserve storage space and bandwidth and allow them to be downloaded more quickly by end users. Python includes some...
If you regularly work with ecommerce data, you’re likely to have encountered PHP serialized arrays or objects. Serialization is a process used to take a complex data structure, such as...
In many data science projects you may need to download remote data, such as images, CSV files, or compressed data. Python makes it fairly straightforward to download files within your...
If your site’s pages aren’t indexed by Google, you’re obviously not going to generate any traffic to them, so you’ll want to check that everything you expect to be present...
Slack is a great tool for data scientists and data engineers and is now being adopted across businesses, so it’s probable that you already use it in your workplace. Besides...
Web scraping is a really useful skill in data science. We obviously need data for our models and analyses, but it’s not always easily available, so building our own datasets...
DRY, or Don’t Repeat Yourself, and the “Do One Thing” methodology are designed to help software engineers and data scientists create better functions. Code that isn’t written using DRY tends...
The flexibility of programming languages like Python means that any code you write to tackle a given problem will differ in approach and style to code written by someone else....
SQLite is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that is easy to access within Python and other languages. Unlike MySQL, PostgreSQL, and other databases, SQLite uses a serverless design, so...
For data scientists, Python operators are one of the most powerful and widely used features of this language. These special symbols or characters tell Python to perform some sort of...
Lists are one of the most widely used data storage objects or data types within Python and are used throughout every data science package. Along with the dictionary, tuple, and...
Docstrings are comment blocks that are added to the top of Python functions to explain the purpose of the function, describe the arguments that it accepts, and explain what the...
While data scientists may do nearly everything in Pandas, we also need to perform file operations in regular Python and in applications not tied to dataframes. Thankfully, Python makes it...
The things we search for online can reveal a remarkable amount about us, even when viewed in aggregate on an anonymous level. For many years, Google has made some of...
Many MySQL databases are configured to accept connections from other servers on the local network and will reject connections from remote machines. Ordinarily, you could work around this by creating...
In ecommerce, it pays to watch what your competitors are doing, so over the past decade or so in which I’ve managed ecommerce businesses, I’ve regularly undertaken competitor analyses. They’re...
Recommender systems, or recommendation engines as they’re also known, are everywhere these days. Whether you’re looking for books on Amazon, tracks on Spotify, movies on Netflix or a date on...
Regular expressions are used for pattern matching in programming, allowing you to identify or extract very specific pieces of text from a string or document. They’re very powerful and extremely...
When dealing with temporal or time series data, the dates themselves often yield information that can vastly improve the performance of your model. However, to get the best from these...
When you use pip to install Python packages from The Python Package Index (PyPi) they get stored in your site-packages directory and are used across your system whenever you run...
