An eCommerce platform is probably the second most common solution, after Web Analytics, we see at our customers. Such an application allows online businesses to manage their webshop and in some cases also their marketing, sales, and operations.
These eCommerce platforms offer all features needed to run an online business, while also integrating with common business tools. There are many types and sizes of platforms. Amongst them there a few well-known platforms like:
These platforms can be open-source, SaaS or headless. And be hosted in the Cloud or On-Premise. Most of these eCommerce platforms offer programmable interfaces (also known as API’s) for easy access to the customer, product and order data.
The challenge of each of these platforms is that the data residing within such a platform is often not that usable for data analysis or in-depth insights. While insights based on this data are often very valuable for your business. Think of Customer Lifetime Value calculations, churn rates (for subscription services) and of course insights into sales and inventory management.
Data delivered via the API – or perhaps even a built-in reporting solution – is often aggregated or limited in reporting period or limited in amount of data. Also, most reporting tools like Klipfolio, Tableau and Looker can’t communicate well or at all with API’s.
For example, Magento’s data model is quite complex and can only be fully understood by real specialists. The Magento reporting API has some serious limitations in how to obtain large amounts of (historical) data from the database. All in all, obtaining insights from Magento data is a complex process because of the specialized knowledge that is required.
Another example is Lightspeed. Lightspeed’s API’s do not have out-of-the-box reporting endpoints and are developed for developers to communicate with the Lightspeed eCommerce platform. Linking the API to a dashboarding solution is therefore not self-evident, but requires more specialist knowledge and a number of intermediate steps. For example, if you need to retrieve the products sold for each order this needs to be done by several requests to multiple API endpoints. This can’t be done in one movement nor be done in any reporting tool.
We have extensive experience in exploring, unlocking and analysing data from eCommerce cans like Magento, WooCommerce and Lightspeed.
Combining this data in a SmartDataPack with data from other cans like Web Analytics or ERP and adding our smart Business Intelligence on top of it, creates powerful insights and boosts your eCommerce business.
Are you using a platform that is not listed here, such as Prestashop or Stripe? No problem, feel free to contact us. There is a real chance that we do have experience with this system, but it is not (yet) in this list. And if we haven’t accessed it before, it’s not a problem, because it’s our job to access all resources as efficiently as possible. Our extensive experience in many different platforms, each with their own specific characteristics, means that we have already tackled most of the common challenges in accessing them.
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