About Collectors
Collectors has been the trusted name in grading and authenticating collectibles since the 1990s. From sports cards and Pokémon trading cards to rare coins, their reputation rests on precision and trust.
In recent years, Collectors expanded into new business lines—building a vault platform, forging partnerships with eBay and GameStop, and enabling buy-back programs. These new ventures demanded a scalable and reliable data platform to serve both operational teams and next-gen machine learning models.
What do they do?
Industry
Location
Scaling Beyond Legacy Reporting
Until 2021, reporting at Collectors ran directly off SQL Server databases that also powered applications. This created performance bottlenecks, latency issues, and accuracy concerns.
The first step forward was Stitch. While it worked initially, Collectors faced a few critical limitations:
Data gaps from incremental replication without CDC logs.
Business trust issues due to inconsistent reporting accuracy.
Weak support responsiveness, with days-long turnaround times.
It was clear: Collectors needed reliable pipelines, predictable pricing, and responsive support.
Hevo became the balance they needed for their stack.
When Collectors trialed Hevo, the difference was immediate:
Smooth Migrations: 99% of Stitch pipelines migrated seamlessly to Hevo.
Support That Cares: Issues were resolved within a month with dedicated plugin fixes.
Operational Excellence: Hevo’s intuitive platform gave visibility into replication volumes and pipeline health, reducing time spent troubleshooting.
With Hevo, Collectors connected GCP BigQuery, dbt transformations, and LightDash dashboards to serve near real-time insights across teams:
Operations: SLA adherence and productivity tracking refreshed every 5 minutes.
Finance: Weekly and monthly revenue/KPI reports across global units.
Marketing: Promo performance, trending card insights, and reverse ETL into Hightouch.
ML Teams: Accuracy tracking of card identification and marketplace price estimate model.
The Results
Cost Efficiency: Hevo delivered data replication at ~50% lower cost than Fivetran and closer to Collectors’ original Stitch pricing.
Reliability & Trust: Pipelines consistently delivered accurate data, restoring confidence across business units.
Business Growth Enablement: Hevo unlocked sources Stitch couldn’t support, powering new dashboards and ML-driven pricing models that directly fuel Collectors’ marketplace expansion.
The biggest benefit we saw after moving to Hevo was the support for some of the replication or ingestion platforms that were either not supported by Stitch or only available via community plugins. Hevo worked really well for us, and we slowly migrated 99% of our existing integrations from Stitch to Hevo.
Looking Ahead
Collectors continues to scale its data ecosystem with Hevo as a core partner. The team is excited about Hevo’s upcoming Iceberg data lake support and expanded streaming integrations, which will unlock even more ML and real-time analytics use cases.
Hevo is proud to power Collectors’ journey from legacy reporting to a modern, reliable, and cost-efficient data stack, and help them stay ahead in the collectibles market.
Excited to see Hevo in action and understand how a modern data stack can help your business grow? Sign up for our 14-day free trial or register for a personalized demo with our product expert.
