Wayfair Tech Blog

Online to Offline: The Technical Backbone of Wayfair’s First Physical Store

Wayfair has its traditions when it comes to business: It’s rooted in e-commerce through and through. Having been at Wayfair for more than three years with our iOS team, I was able to be part of many stages of growth and expansion, right up to my most recent challenge: Building out the technical backend of our first physical store.

Wayfair Tech Blog

BERT Does Business: Implementing the BERT Model for Natural Language Processing at Wayfair

Introduction

Wayfair Tech Blog

We're Never Done: Continuing My Education At Wayfair

Choosing between school and work can be an either-or proposition for many, whether for financial reasons or because there simply don’t seem to be enough hours in the day. When faced with this decision myself, I initially shared similar concerns. However, I soon found that at Wayfair this can be an “and” rather than an “or” situation. Wayfair encourages employees to continue their education and provides resources to help them do so. Though doing both is certainly a challenge, for me it has not only been doable, but also very rewarding. I am currently in my last semester of Georgia Tech’s Online Masters in Analytics program, during which I have taken classes in many areas such as statistics, operations research, and computer science. Over the course of my master’s program, I have found that my continued education has helped me greatly in my day-to-day work.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Wayfair Tech Explains It All: Alex Pankhurst on Inbound/Outbound Fulfillment

Reliable outbound fulfillment, inventory replenishment, and positioning are all fundamental to creating an online purchase experience that delights our customers with rapid home delivery. As a result of our commitment to this reliability, we strive to offer one and two-day delivery times when possible, sharpen customer pricing, lower fulfillment costs, and increase sales through high in-stock levels paired with an exciting delivery experience. In this video, Senior Product Manager Alex Pankhurst will explain how Wayfair is heavily invested in building automated solutions in this space, including scaling our platforms as the complexities of our supply chain continue to grow.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Modeling Uplift Directly: Uplift Decision Tree with KL Divergence and Euclidean Distance as Splitting Criteria

Introduction

Wayfair Tech Blog

Wayfair Tech Explains It All: David Short on Formulaic Naming

Wayfair merchandisers currently spend thousands of hours each year manually naming the millions of products we sell. This unstructured data is costly to maintain and subject to human error as individuals currently update a free text field. With Formulaic Naming, Wayfair is transitioning to a structured solution for naming based on other questions we already ask our suppliers about their products. Once we have this structured information, we can pursue Dynamic Naming, where the product name will vary based on where the name is displayed and the customer who is viewing the product. This week, David Short, a Product Manager in Merchandising Systems at Wayfair, will discuss the work he's doing with Merchandising Engineering to automate this process.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Wayfair DS Explains It All: Anurag Syal on Projection Mapping in 3D

At Wayfair, we do everything we can to help our customers find exactly the products they need to furnish their homes in the style they envision. But creating all of the necessary elements to allow them to do that is not as easy as one might think. Right now, if an artist designs a new stylistic look for a home from scratch, it takes weeks before we actually get to introduce the products in the market to fit that look. Interestingly, it is not product manufacturing, but the creation of 3D models for these products that is the slowest and most expensive part of this process. There are a few key reasons for this; first of all, 3D models are required for product manufacturing, but 3D modeling software licenses and experience modelers are pricey and hard to come by. Secondly, to create a production quality 3D model (using a software like 3DS Max or Maya), 3D modelers need numerous 2D images of the product from various angles; given this requirement, you can imagine how costly a single rework or a minor change could be.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Open-Sourcing Our Internal Frontend Education Platform – Awesome Learning

When you walk into a company like Wayfair, it can feel overwhelming. There are more than 2,300 engineers across the organization. Every person you talk to seems smarter than the last.

Wayfair Tech Blog

Wayfair DS Explains It All: Lin Jia on Measuring Price Effects

Understanding price effects is of high importance to any business, but usually it's not easy to measure. To do this, Wayfair’s algorithms team has been designing modeling and experimental approaches so that we can disentangle the intricate web of causality. In this video, Wayfair Senior Data Scientist Lin Jia explains a couple of ways that we can measure price effects.