When I worked overnights at a homeless youth shelter for a few years, I developed a bad habit: I’d comb through websites and add items I liked to carts, rarely purchasing anything not on deep sale (remember going through catalogs and circling what you wanted as a kid?). Sometimes, I’d get an email later, about “unattended items in [my] cart,” and I’d wonder if my silly time wasting was getting some poor store owner’s hopes up that they’d be making a sale.
In reality though, it was an automated email, and they probably weren’t looking at what I was doing on their site. Though if they did, they’d likely have used a few different tools: Google Analytics for my site behavior, and whatever their POS system was for looking at my purchase history.
But soon eCommerce sites will be able to know exactly what their customers are doing – and they’ll be able to see it all in one place, in real-time. UK-based Crowdstream, founded just this year, is a customer-focused platform for connecting the dots between customers and sales, bridging existing analytics and business tools – allowing you to grow your return on investment (ROI).
Put simply, Crowdstream lets you know who your customers are, where they come from, and how they use your store.
Features
Traffic Source: Find out where your customers – and their sales – came from, whether by organic search, pay-per-click, social media, or referring domain. Know which marketing channels are giving you a good ROI, and which aren’t worth as much investment.
Platform Data: Crowdstream automatically detects the browser, platform, location, language, and device of each user.
Customer Profiles: One view brings user-level data and their interactions with your site together, and shows products, purchases and events.
Reporting: Want to know where a customer came from, what they purchased, and how often they come back? Crowdstream will let you segment, search, and analyze events.
Activity: For every customer who visits your website, you can see their every login, click, sale, and page view – in real-time. Use this info to target your best customers.
Funnel: Look at customers by events performed or not performed – discover where your sales are being missed.
These are just a few of the things Crowdstream offers. There are a ton of other cool features on their site.
The upshot here? Being able to focus on the customer will ultimately provide real ROI. If those sites had been able to see my behavior, they might have sent a coupon with their reminders about items left in my cart, and they’d have been much more likely to make a sale. When it comes to eCommerce customer analytics, knowledge is most definitely power – and money.
Interested?
Currently you can apply for early access, as they seem to be in beta-testing. Once they launch (or if you get accepted), they plan to offer a 14-day free trial. After that, prices range from $39 to $99 monthly, depending on how many data points you want.
