Recharge to Redshift: 2 Easy Ways

Building an all-new data connector is challenging, especially when you are already overloaded with managing & maintaining your existing custom data pipelines. To fulfill an ad-hoc Recharge to Redshift connection request from your sales, finance & analytics team, you’ll have to invest a significant portion of your engineering bandwidth. We know you are short on time & need a quick way out of it. This can be a piece of cake for you if you just need to download and upload a couple of CSV files. Or you could directly opt for an automated tool that fully handles complex transformations and frequent data integrations for you.

In this blog, we will take you through two ways to migrate your data from Recharge to Redshift. We will also provide you with an overview of Recharge and Redshift along with why you need to integrate them for better performance. So let’s dive in!

What is Recharge?

Recharge is one of the leading merchants for handling subscription-based management for e-commerce businesses. It enables merchants to easily manage subscription-based services, recurring billing, and custom subscription experiences for customers. In summary, as businesses evolve with e-commerce, Recharge has proven to be a critical component to businesses that wish to streamline their subscription models and increase their rate of customer retention.

What is Redshift?

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse in the cloud. Users will execute complex heavy queries and analyze enormous data with relatively greater efficiency. Redshift integrates well with all sorts of data sources as well as platforms, which makes it pretty popular among companies looking to perform analytics and report on their data.

How to Connect Recharge to Redshift?

Method 1: Fast and Easy Freshsales to BigQuery Migration with Hevo

Step 1: Connect Recharge as your source

Step 2: Connect Redshift as your destination.

In a matter of minutes, you can complete this No-Code & automated approach of connecting Recharge to Redshift using Hevo and start analyzing your data.

The pipeline will automatically replicate new and updated data from Recharge to Redshift every hour(by default). However, you can also adjust the Recharge to Redshift data replication frequency per your requirements.

Data Replication Frequency

Default Pipeline Frequency	Minimum Pipeline Frequency	Maximum Pipeline Frequency	Custom Frequency Range (Hrs)
1 Hr	1 Hr	24 Hrs	1-24

Method 2: Exporting & Importing data as CSV Files

For directly replicating data from Recharge to Redshift in the form of CSV files, follow the easy steps given below:

• Step 1: Using Recharge’s Export Builder Tool, you can export your CSV files containing customer, order, and subscription data. Firstly, log into your Recharge account and click on Exports in the Merchant Portal.
• Step 2; Click Create Exports. Click on the dropdown menu below the Select export type option, and choose your desired export.
• Step 3: Specify your custom export name (optional) and your e-mail address. For a few selected reports, you can select a date range of up to 90 days. Finally, click on the Create Export button. You will receive an email with a download link. Click on the link and download your CSV file.

You can also directly download a copy of the export from the main Exports page. Click the download icon under Actions to download the file as a CSV. 

• Step 4: You can now upload this CSV file to an Amazon S3 bucket using AWS CLI or the web console From there, you can import the CSV file to Redshift using the COPY command. 

COPY table_name
FROM 's3://<your-bucket-name>/load/file_name.csv'
credentials 'aws_access_key_id=<Your-Access-Key-ID>;aws_secret_access_key=<Your-Secret-Access-Key>'
CSV;

Note that you will need to generate AWS Access and Secret Key to use the COPY command and complete the Recharge to Redshift data replication process.  

With the above 4-step approach, you can easily replicate data from Recharge to Redshift using CSV files and SQL queries. This method performs exceptionally well in the following scenarios:

• Once in a Blue Moon Data Replication: When your business teams need this Google Drive data only quarterly, yearly, or just this one time, then the manual effort & time is justified.
• Analysis-Ready Data: No to little data transformation is possible with this approach. Hence, it is ideal if the data in your spreadsheets is clean, standardized, and present in an analysis-ready form.
• Low Volume Data: It can be a tedious task to repeatedly download & write SQL queries for uploading several CSV files. Moreover, if you are trying to get the business’s overall performance, merging these CSV files from multiple departments is time-consuming. Hence, this method is optimal for replicating only a few files.

However, when you need to monitor the complete cash flow of the business, you will have to get data from multiple sources in a single place. In this situation, manually downloading, integrating & cleaning data is not an efficient choice. Eventually, your engineering team will create and maintain custom data connectors. They will always be on guard for data leakage and have to fix any issues on priority. This takes up to 40-60 % of their bandwidth which was supposed to be used for their primary engineering goals.   

What can you achieve by replicating data from Recharge to Redshift?

Replicating data from Recharge to Redshift can help your data analysts get critical business insights. Here’s a short list of questions that this data integration helps answer:

• How does CMRR (Churn Monthly Recurring Revenue) vary by Marketing campaign?
• How much of the Annual Revenue was from In-app purchases?
• Which campaigns have the most support costs involved?
• For which geographies are marketing expenses the most?
• How does your overall business cash flow look like?
• Which sales channel provides the highest purchase orders?

Employing an automated tool allows you to get a 360 view of your business performance and lets you easily integrate Recharge data with multiple sources in Redshift. This provides better clarity to your business teams on the company’s financial health.

Putting It All Together

Manual downloading of CSV files can be absolute bliss if you rarely get Recharge data requests from your analytics teams. But what happens when your business teams need fresh data every few hours from various sources? You will be forced to burden your engineering team with building and managing custom data pipelines. Or you can remove this dependency by opting for an automated solution like Hevo data that offers 150+ plug-and-play integrations(including 40+ free sources like Recharge).

Saving countless hours of manual data cleaning & standardizing, Hevo Data’s pre-load data transformations get it done in minutes via a simple drag n-drop interface or your custom python scripts. No need to go to your data warehouse for post-load transformations. You can simply run complex SQL transformations from the comfort of Hevo’s interface and get your data in the final analysis-ready form. 

Sign up for a 14-day free trial and simplify your data integration process. Check out the pricing details to understand which plan fulfills all your business needs.

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