eCommerce companies have tight margins for technology; adopting a tech solution can impact cash flows and eat into profitability.
The nature of the business of eCom is of scale, so they need certain tools to make it easier for them to analyse customer behaviour, to optimise and identify areas of opportunity
So they end up adopting tools which are freely available. The most common tool adopted is Google Analytics due to its dependency on Google Ads and SEO traffic.
But when it comes to martech, Google Analytics has its limitations
- It can take 4-8 hours to process data into GA4
- Data gets sampled, and you do not get an exact count
- No Integration with modern attribution, customer engagement, shopping platform or payment integrator.
- Difficult to have offline conversion use cases since there’s only a 72-hour window to send backfill or offline data
- Historical data only reaches 14 months
- Can only track 50 event-scoped custom dimensions, 25 user-scoped custom dimensions, and 50 total custom metrics
- With GA4’s data cardinality issues (limits on rows, breakdowns, etc), users are often forced to export their data, go into BigQuery, and use SQL to find the answer to complex questions
- Google Ads is the only supported automatic collection of ad data
- Can only look at 10 steps in a user journey conversion funnel, and segment by four cohorts
- Only has a simple conversion funnel available
- Can only view where users dropped off in a funnel and not where else they went
- GA4 is not fully GDPR compliant, which is risky since you might need to take it off the site
- GA4 is not HIPAA compliant, so if you are a business under HIPAA, then you need to look into additional security measures
At Optiblack, we talk with about 50+ eComs every month. When we show a product analytics solution like Mixpanel, they do feel the need because Google Analytics is not real-time, samples data and is not ideal for product teams or integrates with attribution or customer engagement tools
eCom companies are dependent on Google Analytics for running their Google Ads
Leading to being tied to the ecosystem
We have tried to move them to Mixpanel in the past, but for eCom companies, the budget is always a challenge, which does not leave much room for spending on Mixpanel analytics, leading to people not adopting
Hence, the Project Observability for eCom to build a cost-efficient, scalable and adaptable data stack solution for eCom
After working with 30+ eCom companies, we felt that for mass adoption, they need a cost-effective way to do it
Hence, we propose an open-source solution which gives performance, control, flexibility and scalability
We observed
- They track a similar type of data as part of tracking
- eCom companies' dashboards and data requirements are standard across eCom
- There are pre-defined metrics that eCom companies track
So we developed a solution under Project Observability:
- eCom specific data stack
- Cost efficient
- Gives CAC, ROAS calculation by collecting Ad data
- Scalable from 0 to $ 100 M+ Revenue and eCom of all sizes
- Works with other tools in the stack
- A data stack that gives control in the hands of eCom companies for their data
- Data stack that can ever expand as eCom goes from 0 to 1 Million, $ 10 M+, $ 100 M+
- Ability to expand to Custom dashboards and metrics
- Load data from offline transactions and retail stores
- Ability to build your data algorithms on the data collected
Our solution includes open-source Rudderstack + BigQuery + Looker Studio
This has already been implemented at eComs, doing 2-10 million traffic every month, and this data stack is 30-40% of the cost of the solutions available in the market.
Taking into account the standard events for eCom
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Events
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Trigger when a user
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Add Payment Info
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submits their payment information during checkout
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Add Shipping Info
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submits their shipping information during checkout
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Add to Cart
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add items to their shopping cart
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Add to Wishlist
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add items to their wishlist
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Begin Checkout
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begins checkout
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Purchase
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completes a purchase
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Refund
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receives a refund
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Remove from cart
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removes item from their shopping cart
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Select item
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selects an item from a list of items or offerrings
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Select promotion
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selects a promotion
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View cart
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views their shopping cart
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View item
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views an item
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View item list
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views a list of items or offerrings
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View promotion
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views a promotion on your website or app
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Optiblack can build this tech stack for you. To discuss a roadmap for your organisation, reach out over here