website analysis script

[jasone]

Hello all!

I want to create an analysis tool for my client, the website will have a shopping cart etc. and i would like to create a protected section to the website to track the following details:

Online sales analysis
o What products were sold and when
o Regional sales details to target marketing areas
o Monthly revenue details from online sales and enquires (charts)

any ideas where i might be able to get some source code for this... or even a starting point so i can get cracking on this!

:-)
anymore details required just reply, otherwise many thanks in advance!

Jason

[nathj]

Hello all!

I want to create an analysis tool for my client, the website will have a shopping cart etc. and i would like to create a protected section to the website to track the following details:

Online sales analysis
o What products were sold and when
o Regional sales details to target marketing areas
o Monthly revenue details from online sales and enquires (charts)

any ideas where i might be able to get some source code for this... or even a starting point so i can get cracking on this!

:-)
anymore details required just reply, otherwise many thanks in advance!

Jason

Jason,

There are a couple of options available to you.

Write Your Own
This would then need to record what sales happened and when, and track all the other site usage data your client would be interested in. This could be done in PHP, but you will possibly need some client side scripting as well. This is just an overiew. If you pursue this idea a few more details about the sites functionality would be required, but it is possible.

Google Analytics
This is a tool I have used myself on one project and it allows you to track site access and set up targets and goals so you can see how many people reach certain parts of the site, this can be the final page of a registration process for example.

This could save you some time and effort as Google provides the script to put on eac page they also supply an interface for viewing the details.

I'm sure there are a number of tools out there, just run a search on web site analytics to get more information. Also, should you decide to develop it yourself, there are many ways to go about this too - it depends what features are a priority in the system as to which implementation methodology is best.

Cheers
nathj

[jasone]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply, I will be writing the script myself, using php. are there any good tutorials for this sort of thing?

regards

jason

[nathj]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply, I will be writing the script myself, using php. are there any good tutorials for this sort of thing?

regards

jason

Hi Jason

I don't know of any good tutorials for this sort of thing, or any bad ones come to that. However, I would start by asking the following questions:
1. What information to I want to track?
2. At what point in the process or useage flow do I want to capture that information?

This will tell you where you need to put any code and what sort of PHP functions you should be looking for. Once you know this post back and I'll see if I can help with any more specifics.

One thing that you might find helpful in this is $_SERVER This will help with all sorts of data, like where the user came from - if it's traceable, this can help you to build up an idea of the most common pathway through a site. There's all sorts in this pre-defined global, so it's worth a look.

Cheers
nathj