Google Analytics and Spry

I haven't posted much lately because I've been spending time reading and learning about a couple of interesting technologies and solutions that will definitely affect small business e-commerce in the upcoming months.

1. Google Analytics
   A good, free Web statistics solution (from Google's purchase of Urchin). It's easy to track statistics on your Web site (and Web store) using Google Analytics. And the price is hard to beat. Look into it if you haven't yet. But... where things get really interesting is when you can tie your e-commerce store to your GA account so that sales data is fed to the system. Then Google Analytics can output some really neat reports about where your sales are coming from. There are a couple of issues with handling refunds and cancellations, which is one of the things we are working on at Early Impact. Check with your shopping cart provider to see where they are with Google Analytics integration. You might be able to turn it on already.
2. Spry
   Adobe (ex Macromedia) is working on a framework for AJAX that will make it easier for an ecommerce development company to add more, cool interface elements to our applications. For example, you could have your ecommerce store tell you which customers exist in the database as you type the customer name, facilitating and speeding up searches. You can read about Spry and play with some of their demos at: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/ - Spry can also help you add some cutting-edge looking navigation to your storefront.

I'll blog more about both things in the upcoming weeks.