Is it fair to say that statistics are one of the top 3 most important features in eCommerce software? I think so, and that's the reason we've spent nearly 2 weeks working exclusively on building USEFUL statistics and reports into StoreSuite's control panel.

As we're now extremely close to the beta (we have gone from having over 30+ features on the "To Do" list 4 weeks ago to now only having 2, plus time for internal testing) I will only be posting a summary of features in StoreSuite from here on in. Today I'll give a brief summary of statistics.

When I asked for your opinion on how you'd use reports and stats in StoreSuite (I didn't approve any comments because they contained such valuable opinions from the readers of this blog, so a big thanks to everyone who comments. You've helped us make statistics in StoreSuite better than any other eCommerce software on the market) I didn't expect so many comments. We received over a dozen LONG, detailed comments, which I really appreciate.

One comment that stood out went something like this:

"Your stats will have to be pretty good because Google Analytics is far superior to anything else, and most people wont even use the StoreSuite statistics."

This comment is fair enough, and really made me spend days researching which stats and reports would make StoreSuite better than EVERY other competitor currently on the market. And I think we've done it.

StoreSuite has its own built in stats and reports but can also be integrated into StoreSuite Analytics (a version of our TrackPoint product that we're reworking), Google Analytics and/or any other analytics package that works in the same way, so StoreSuite will work how you want it to, not the other way around.

Here's a brief overview of some of the reports StoreSuite provides you with. Most have fully interactive flash-based charts along with a tabular report of the data for all products/orders/customers as required:

1. Store snapshot: See unique visitors VS orders VS conversion rate for any period of time.
    
2. Top 20 customers: View details of your top 20 customers including number of orders and revenue for any period of time.
    
3. Best selling products: See which products are selling the best (including number sold, total revenue and total profit) for any period of time.
    
4. Order locations: See exactly (down to street level) where each of your orders came from and bring up order history for any customer. This report uses Google maps and is my favorite report in StoreSuite.
    
5. Orders overview: Just like "Store snapshot" but also includes all orders for the period in a tabular, sortable format.
    
6. Orders by items sold: See average number of items per order, revenue per product and number of items per order for any period of time.
    
7. Orders by revenue: See average revenue per order in both chart and tabular format. Great for providing promotions that entice people to spend a minimum amount per order to receive free shipping.
    
8. Products overview: See units sold, revenue and profit for every single product in your store for any time period.
    
9. Popular products: See how many times each product has been viewed in your store as well as average customer rating.
    
10. Inventory report: See exact stock levels for each product and update stock levels in real-time.
     
11. Customers by date: See how many customers signed up for any time period, as well as the conversion rate from visitor to customer.
     
12. Revenue per customer: See who your best customers are, based on how much they've spent in your store.
     
13. Popular search keywords: See which keywords people are searching for and if the search results are leading them to add products to their cart.
     
14. Search spelling suggestion: StoreSuite includes automatic spelling suggestions. See which words your customers are spelling incorrectly and how many spelling suggestions StoreSuite has made.

Combine the stats and reporting with the ability to view and export orders/products/customers by an unlimited number of combinations (by search keywords and/or date and/or any of the 10+ other variables) to excel or an XML file, as well as the ability to integrate with StoreSuite Analytics and/or Google Analytics and I am confident you will not find better reporting in any other eCommerce software.

The good news about stats in StoreSuite is that they're all AJAX based. That means that even if you have 500,000 products or orders in your store, you wont experience a long page loading time while waiting for the stats to load. When you're paging through orders/products/customers in StoreSuite's control panel as well, everything is AJAX-based, so you don't have to wait around for pages to load.

We added that feature this week and it makes such a difference when you have thousands of products in your store (so far we've tested StoreSuite on a basic shared server and it can handle 100,000 products and 10,000 categories. We will be optimizing this even further during the beta period).

By the way, if you're planning to pre-order a copy of StoreSuite at the discounted prices then I'd recommend you do it soon. The beta is on schedule for a late December release and soon after that the prices will be going up in time for the official release. Most prices are discounted at around 50% currently.