CoreCommerce

So you’ve got your store setup and you’ve got your products listed, so now all you have to do is sit back, relax and watch the orders come in, right?

In the real world, in order to make sales you have to get people in the store. Similarly in the online world, in order to make sales you have to get people to find your site.

So how do you know how many people visit your site? How do you figure out how many abandon carts you might get (people who put stuff in their carts but never check out – or leave during the checkout process)?

Our favorite online friend, Google, has another powerful tool for webmasters to use. You can sign up for an Analytics account at http://www.google.com/analytics/.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is more than just a hit counter. Not only can you track how many people visit your site, you can also see:

• What browsers and operating systems they use (so you can optimize your site for them)
• What sites they came from to get to your site
• How much direct traffic you get (people just typing in your address)
• How many people come to your site from search engines and what keywords they use.
• Average time spent on your site
• Your bounce rate (how many people leave your site before a set amount of seconds)

Google offers an advanced look at who visits your site, what they use to visit it and where they came from. This allows you to optimize your site to ensure it works as well as possible for the people who visit your site the most.

How to Setup Your Store with Google Analytics

In order for Google to be able to track your visitors, you need to insert a piece of code into your site. CoreCommerce makes it easy by providing a section in your admin area to do this without needing to touch any code.

Simple copy and paste the code Google gives you and login to your CoreCommerce admin account. Navigate to the “design” tab and click on “Google Analytics” Then you just copy and paste your code in and within an hour, Google will start tracking your visitors.

How To Use Conversions

Within Analytics you can also set up “Conversions”. Conversions allows you to track a single page to see how many visitors make it there. For example, you can set up your Analytics to see how many customers make it to the “Order Complete” page. This will give you a drop out and conversion rate. (For example, 10% of visitors end up buying a product).

To set this up, simply navigate to “Analytics Settings” in the upper left hand corner of your Analytics page. Click on the Edit button next to the set you want to add a Conversion Goal to.

From here, you can add multiple goals and set it to track either time on site, a certain page or amount of visits. If you want to track how many people make it to your “Order Complete” page and how many people drop out in the middle of the checkout process, you can use the “Goal Funnel” at the bottom of the Add/Edit Goal settings to create a series of pages. Simply enter in each page the user has to visit in order to checkout.

This will allow you to see if your checkout process is too long or complicated for users to use. If you have a high dropout rate, your form may even be completely unusable (this is why our one-page checkout forms are so popular!).

You want to cater your business to the users that are most likely to buy, as well as ensure your site is easy to use. Google Analytics in conjunction with the other Google tools we’ve mentioned is great for fine-tuning your store to perfection!

As usual the CoreCommerce team has been busy reading your suggestions and implementing new features. Below is the list of features recently added.

• Category Design Widget – You can now choose how you want your category list on your storefront to display. You can expand them to display sub-categories, you can set roll-over or hover colors and you can even have rollover pop-outs to display your sub-categories. All of this can be controlled in your admin area interface. Just click on the tools tab and then click on category widget layout. From there you can choose in the drop down what kind of category display you want

• Store Front Buttons Can Now Be Images – Instead of using the form buttons for the add to cart or continue shopping you can now upload your own custom add to cart buttons, continue shopping buttons and more on the store front, you will just need to check the box on design integration page. From there you would need to upload your buttons with FTP and overwrite the existing button image with the same name. Don’t worry though in a future release shortly you will be able to do this in your admin area without using FTP!

• Vendor Drop Down – If you are using vendors you can now choose to display them in a list format or drop down format on the store front.

• Mass Update Products – You can update your SKU, price, sale price, available, taxable, featured and inventory for products directly on one page without having to go into each product individually. This can save you a lot of time when update items in bulk.

• Bulk Status Change – When viewing your orders, instead of updating the status of each order one at a time, you will be able to update your orders in bulk by using the bulk status change feature.

• Language Library Search – On the top right you will now see a search field. You can now do a search to update a specific word or phrase rather than having to click on edit for each category and try to find the word manually.

• Category Top and Bottom Images – The top and bottom images for the categories now also display on the category pages for better consistency.

• Category Teasers – We have added a new field for categories called teaser. This way you can break out your teaser and description for categories. This will allow you to have a long description and a short teaser under each category name.

• Product Import – This was updated to handle more products and now includes a progress bar.

• Product Option Export – Previously you had to have the product ID to import options, that is no longer the case as we also look at your SKU to match up your product options with the products are you assigning them too.

• Shop By Price Widget – You can add this new widget to your store to allow your customers to browse your products by price. For example your customers could see a drop down containing $0-$25, $25-$50, $50-$75, $75-$100, $100+.

• Subscription Billing Price – You can now set a special price for the recurring charges. For example, you could set a product to be $250.00, but each recurring charge for that product would only be $75.

• Google Analytics Order Tracking Code – Using the Google Analytics order tracking code you can now pass items, item amount, total and order number to Google for their analytic tracking.

• Batch Print Friendly Receipts – When viewing orders you can batch print your receipts without having to go into each order to do so. You can do this with the Batch Printer Friendly Receipt button on your orders page. Just check the boxes you want to print and then click the button.

• CVV2 Display – If you choose not to want to use the cvv2 code (that is the 3 or 4 digit code on the back of credit cards) and you can now turn this off. Just go to payment settings and look for Display CVV2 Code.

• Turn Off Coupons – If you don’t use coupons, you can remove the coupon fields from your store front by going to the settings for shopping cart behavior. At the bottom look for Display Coupon. If you uncheck this coupons would no longer display on the front end to your customers.