Since moving to Australia and working with clients to get the most from their ecommerce platforms, I have found that here at least, there are many questions on how to start and get to the next level with ecommerce of any scale.

In this 6 part series, I outline the simple steps to make sure you have a great foundation for your ecommerce platform.

This blog series is not going to tell you what you should sell, it is about getting to the next level and how to make selling whatever you have a reality.

Step 5 – Mining your data to learn customer habits and insights

Now you have opened up the website to the entire world, you'll need to have more interaction between your customers and your site. Once you're selling, you'll want to make improvements and get existing customers to repurchase, so the next step is to assess the data you are collecting on customer's habits and how they use the site.

Collecting the Data

One of the beauties of the internet is the accessibility of data on how customers are interacting with your site. Any platform will have some degree of analytics. If you are not collecting information on your website use, set this up before you begin anything else. I've listed some examples below:

Google Analytics

This is free and a good start for most websites:

http://analytics.google.com

Clicky

Clicky is hailed as a simple analytics package for people who don't want too much information:

http://getclicky.com/

Piwik

If you want an open source piece of software that will show you real time statistics, this is the way to go:

http://piwik.org/

Above and Beyond

Beyond this data, most good platforms will store a host of information; for example, our platform TaoShop stores the following by default as well as much more:

Product Data

1. Products that are viewed
2. Products that are liked
3. Products that are searched for
4. Which products have reviews
5. Which products are added to which lists
   

Behaviour Information

1. Pages that are viewed
2. What is purchased on the site and how it was found
3. Campaigns customers are coming from
4. Which vouchers are being used
5. Where the customers are signing up from
   

Order Information

1. What customers are ordering
2. How long customers take to order and time between orders
   

This information and many more data points will be captured over the lifetime of a website. This is way down at step 5 because, until your site has been running for a long time, you won't have enough data available to get sensible information from.

Analysing the data

Once collected, you'll need to analyse the data. We have a special team who originally came from a company called Snowball: they're gurus at analyzing data. They love nothing more than finding behaviour and then predicting what people want. They also assist our customers in making all communication personal. For example, if you have a customer who has purchased this season's top fiction novel, don't send them marketing material for a load of children's novels three months down the track (unless, of course, they are searching for or showing behavior to indicate they're interested in kid's books). This personal approach results in a far higher ROI to clients than the traditional “Send everyone the same message, see who hasn’t opened an email for 6 months and stop sending to them, rinse, repeat”.

Ongoing

The challenge is how you make sense of your data. Experience tells me that many companies choose to ignore this valuable task as they can simply send out a discount voucher to get more traffic in troubled times.

If you think of this early on, you'll be able to begin collecting the necessary data to make good decisions further down the path.

Be proactive: use the information to improve your site, your communication with customers and your internal stake holders.