Using Third-Party Shopping Carts
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Written by Atila on September 5, 2008 – 9:30 am
Smaller e-commerce sites often use third-party solutions for shopping carts. Third-party shopping carts allow e-commerce merchants to accept credit cards as a payment option and have the added benefit of being hosted by a third party.
It can be a lot easier during the initial setup, but when you want to track third-party shopping cart transactions with Google Analytics, you must take some extra steps. If you host your own shopping cart, you can skip this task because it does not apply to you. However, if you use any sort of remotely hosted or third-party shopping cart service, this task will prove useful.
The basic idea behind tracking while using third-party shopping carts is to get the information about the sale transferred from the remote cart back to your Web site, which may not seem like a problem at first because you can include your tracking code on the remote page. However, you want to know the original source of those customers. Because of this, you must pass some information about your customer along to the secure site that hosts your cart.
This transfer of information is done by making additions to the links from your Web site to the third-party shopping cart. These pieces of code pass along all the information that Google Analytics has collected, including initial referral, time on site, and the path the customer took through your site while making his purchase. These are all infinitely valuable pieces of information that you definitely do not want lost in the transition to the remote shopping cart. Correctly installing these tags is of the utmost importance to tracking every one of your sales, and putting that knowledge to good use.
If you run into a situation where the company who hosts your third-party shopping cart claims it is unable to allow you to set up Google Analytics to track your sales, you should strongly consider selecting another ecommerce shopping cart provider. Some of the issues you may want to consider include, first, what kind of service you are paying for when you are unable to use the largest and most encompassing free analytics tool, and second, whether it is worth it to host your own shopping cart.
Hosting your own shopping cart can be a bit of work, but it makes tracking your transactions much easier. As was previously mentioned in the task “Set up E-Commerce Tracking,” using the e-commerce feature of Google Analytics provides access to the absolute metric for success: the total revenue generated for any given period. Not having this information means you could be missing the opportunity to discover from real gems in the form of overlooked keywords that convert at a high rate.
If the remotely hosted shopping cart solution does not work out, hosting your own shopping cart is highly recommended. Not having this information about your traffic sources simply is not an option if you want to maximize your Web site’s revenue potential.
