Ecommerce Analytics is Hard

One of the key features in v1.5 of Piwik is the ability to track ecommerce events, like viewing a product, placing items in a shopping cart, and purchasing an order. The Piwik team has been working with the folks at ecommerce analytics company Jirafe on these features, and we are very proud of our progress to date.

While tracking and reporting ecommerce data is hard, it is equally hard to implement ecommerce analytics tags on your web site. Just think about the integration – each product page, shopping cart page, confirmation page needs specialized tags, which hook into data (e.g. price, quantity, tax, shipping, etc). And this is not taking into account Javascript ‘add to cart’ functions, returns, and other features!

We pride ourselves on making Piwik INCREDIBLY simple to install, setup, and use. We also want to make the process of implementing ecommerce tracking even simpler. To this end, we are working closely with the folks from Jirafe to implement plugins in ecommerce platforms (such as Magento, Prestashop, etc.) that automate setting up tags in all of the right places, and to create a hosted service so that there is an automated registration, installation, setup, and reporting inside of the ecommerce platform.

We are really excited about the potential developments here. By using an open source tool like Piwik, with our huge community to help provide feedback on plugins on various platforms, we have a truly unique way to bring enterprise level reporting to all ecommerce businesses, big and small.