As one of the first people to have the new cart log analyzer mod installed by Gary at
http://www.x-cart-plus.com
I've been asked to write a short unbiased review of it.
What does it do??
The main aim of the cart log analyzer is that you can see at a glance what items have been placed into your cart regardless of whether they have been bought or not BUT it does so much more.
Straight away afer click the "customer carts" link in your shop admin you are presented with a familair search form where you can choose your cart date ranges (from > to)
You can display all products placed in your cart, products that have been placed but not purchased or only show products that have been purchased
From there you can click on any person who has added products to your cart and get a complete order history and/or list of what they have viewed in that session.
Im sure you don't need telling how important it is to know exactly whats selling and whats not - using the cart log analyzer certainly makes a big difference in figuring that out
Next up is "cart product stats"
With a swift click on this link again you are presented with the familair search interface, so from here i chose the date range of between 1st and 5th of October
Straight away i get a list of all products that have been added to cart and how many times they have been added to cart as well denoted by the "cart count" field
Im not too sure about the usefullness of this feature, i presume ok it's good to know but i've yet to make use of it.
Poor Cart Products
From here is a very easy way of seeing what products you've got that just aren't selling or havent been added to cart, this would be of good use if you have a large inventory but are a small bussiness as it's quite hard to keep control of whats hot and whats not when working with a large amount of items, i was interested to find out that we have only one item that hasn't been added to basket before (which i find strange as it's a nice classic piece of swimwear)
Viewed product stats
This one is good, basically again you get your usual search form, so after you have put in your criteria it will display all products within that range ALONG with how many times that particular product has been viewed, this is quite usefull because say for example you have an item that is being viewed a lot but no one is buying it, after being presented with that information you can then take a deeper look at that product to see if there is anything in the description etc. that may be putting off the punters.
Poor viewed products
As above but in reverse.
All in all I would say that cart log analyzer is one of the essential mods that i have installed on my site, if you take your stats seriously and like to know exactly what is going on in your store then it's a must have purchase.
There are a couple of things that still need tweaking and which aren't finished yet like the "ISSUE STORE WIDE DISCOUNT COUPON BY EMAIL" where you can target a particular customer in your cart log and send him a discount coupon via email.
So when that is finished i'll be first up at the doorstep getting the version installed with that in.