[osCmax v2.5x] Enhancing Report Functions

[ridexbuilder]

Have been thinking of late about some lacking features...

• Report on customers who purchased a given product/from a particular category. This can be useful for a number of reasons. Examples: contact customers about a manufacturing defect or see how popular a given product range is. The former doesn't lie in the remit of product notifications, which is optional for customers. I have the osC contribution working, for a given product but not quite got the category part working. ('Max 2.0.25)
• Report on customers who haven't returned for a given length of time (3 or 5 years), with an option to purge their details from the database, possibly including orders (or at least clearing name & address details). Not only would this reduce historical bloat but may help with Data Protection matters.

[ragerbua]

What I really miss is a statistic about the keywords visitors used in the search form. I had that functionality custom-built in my outdated osCommerce shop (which still exists as a backup).

IMHO, this is a real eye-opener because you will find out what people really are looking for in your shop. You'd be surprised by the results.

I can hardly code PHP but maybe this contribution is worth looking at:
osCommerce Community Add-Ons

[pgmarshall]

Please add it to the bugtracker as a 'feature' and it will get looked at for v2.6.

I agree this is useful information ... If you use the Google Analytics module this information is recorded in Analytics.

Regards,

[ragerbua]

To be honest, I don't see why Google *WHATEVER* service should be involved in this. In a time where privacy issues are permanently discussed, search queries should be kept private, which means, they should be traced in my very own SQL table and nowhere else.

Just my tuppence worth...

[ridexbuilder]

they should be traced in my very own SQL table and nowhere else.

This is the scary bit!
I've being doing a migration recently that had "supertracker" installed. Arrgh!!! Over 144Mb of garb integrated with 12Mb of osCmax standard data - all in the same database. If that ain't crass, what is? (Rhetorical)

[met00]

I'm going to agree in part with ridex here, I removed a "tracker" application from two osCmax because the amount of data being stored was excessive compared to the overall size of the database and I saw the performance issues with mytop against the database. In one case the store was moved to google and in the other it was just dropped because he owner didn't want to go through the headache of dealing with google. In both cases the server showed increased performance and the reduction in database was huge.

On the other hand, if we are talking about just capturing search terms as they are entered in either the search box or advanced search form within the store, that night be reasonable.

[pgmarshall]

Google Analytics has a opt in/out data sharing ... there should be no worries about storing search terms captured through Google Analytics and I prefer to use their server to process/store the reems of data that this sort of tracking produces.

It really is a very powerful piece of kit - you can funnel user paths to see how many people you lose during checkout ... you can do A|B analysis to see which pages work better on your customers, you can track search terms used, track where people came from, went to, browser, screen resolution, bouce rate, the list goes on and on. Check out "In Page Analytics" which shows you a heat map of where people tend to click ...

It is a class leader, it is free and easy to integrate.

I don't think that in the grand scale of things even if google did want to use the search terms from a website that they would have any value at all.

Anyway - each to there own ... osCmax has got Google Analytics ready to go if people want to use it ...

Also, once I get Add This in there as well you can integrate your social media advertising effects into the same dashboard ...

Regards,

[ragerbua]

This is the scary bit!
I've being doing a migration recently that had "supertracker" installed. Arrgh!!! Over 144Mb of garb integrated with 12Mb of osCmax standard data - all in the same database. If that ain't crass, what is? (Rhetorical)

You're right, ridexbuilder. My old database has 96 MB. Didn't think much about it but now i realize why it is that big.