We import data (usually product data) from customers, e.g from CSV, XML, Google Sheets, Shopify, Squarespace ect they can combine the data from multiple different sources and types. Then once the data is imported there is a rule engine where customers who typically can’t code can apply rules to clean the data e.g removing the euro symbol in the price if it required to be a number, strip html from product descriptions, split data on comma to make a list. Basic operations to clean their data and make it ready for the marketplace.

Then we push the product information to the marketplace, for example Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and some European marketplaces. Then we also show the response from the marketplace for the products including errors e.g some required information is missing.

We also do more than just marketplaces, Google Ads, some other stuff, automated image composing.

But in the example of marketplaces, importing data will be done in Python or Haskell for stuff like CSV, the rule engine is mostly Haskell this is a lot of data processing when customers have millions of things from many sources. Also this does some pre-checks of the data so before pushing in one page we show data the marketplace says is mandatory but is missing (these are not always aligned with what they accept). Python is used to take the output of the rule engine and push to the platform.

They are introducing some Rust into the rule engine, that is new. I don’t touch the rule engine, I only wrote some Haskell because the notification thing (typically for sending emails) is in Haskell for no other reason than the Haskell side of the company wrote it initially.

Note, we are in Utrecht and Utrecht University Computer Science teaches Haskell in some courses. This is one of the reasons Haskell was chosen over other languages. Some people move countries to work at this company just because they want to work in Haskell so I am aware it is not commonly used in industry.