# Retail analytics lane decision matrix

Choose **streaming (Kinesis)** vs **batch (Glue)** vs **direct query (Athena)** per retail
data product. Assumes **S3 Tables** (Apache Iceberg) as the silver/gold layer in 2026.

## Decision rules

| Signal type | Volume (events/day) | Latency SLA | Recommended lane | AWS services |
|-------------|---------------------|-------------|------------------|--------------|
| Clickstream / cart events | >500k | <15 min | Streaming | Kinesis Data Streams → Firehose → S3 Tables |
| POS transactions | 50k–2M | <1 hour | Micro-batch or stream | Kinesis or Glue 15-min schedule |
| ERP inventory snapshot | <10M rows | Daily | Batch | Glue ETL → Iceberg on S3 Tables |
| Loyalty tier changes | <100k | Daily | Batch | Glue + catalog publish to SageMaker Catalog |
| Ad impression logs | >5M | Hourly | Streaming | Kinesis → Athena Iceberg MERGE |
| Store footfall | 10k–500k | 15 min | Streaming | IoT Core or Kinesis → Timestream optional |

## When NOT to stream

- Single-region retailer with **one nightly ERP extract** and no real-time personalization
- SKU count **<5k** and dashboards refresh daily is acceptable
- Team lacks on-call for Kinesis iterator age alarms

## When NOT to batch-only

- Cart abandonment recovery needs **<30 min** trigger
- Flash sale inventory sync across channels
- Same-day ship-from-store allocation

## QuickSight mode

| Mode | Use when | Trade-off |
|------|----------|-----------|
| **SPICE** | Dashboards with <10M rows, <25 datasets, predictable refresh | 15–60 min import lag |
| **Direct query** | Ad-hoc SKU drill-down, live inventory | Query cost + latency at scale |

## Related posts

- [Retail omnichannel analytics lakehouse](/blog/aws-retail-omnichannel-analytics-lakehouse-2026/)
- [QuickSight production guide](/blog/amazon-quicksight-production-guide-best-practices/)
- [Athena query cost optimization](/blog/athena-query-cost-optimization-partition-compress-cache-iceberg/)
- [Building a data lake on AWS](/blog/building-a-data-lake-on-aws-s3-glue-athena-architecture/)