It's a general requirement for merchants to be able to track the performance of their store and how well it fairs in converting visitors to paying customers. You'd be crazy not to need to track and analyse the performance of your store to learn what works and what doesn't!
This article covers what you need to do to enable you to start monitoring your customers' activity through Google Analytics. This article also covers what you need to do so that your E-Commerce tracking works correctly in monitoring your sales conversions.
A. Sign up for a Google Analytics account and paste the UA code in your shop settings as per this article.
B. Tracking E-Commerce specific data
SupaDupa automatically logs purchase data with your Google Analytics account when customers return from PayPal but you need to have E-commerce tracking enabled to see this data.
In case you haven't done so already, here's how to enable E-commerce tracking on your Google Analytics account:
Log into your Google Analytics account
Go to Profile Settings
Under E-Commerce Settings, select "Yes, an E-commerce Site" from the drop down menu
Click on the Apply button to save changes
But why aren't e-commerce sales appearing in my Google Analytics?!
In our experience, only about 50% of customers making a purchase on your boutique will click on the 'Return to Merchant link' (PayPal) after completing their payment at PayPal. PayPal does however have an Auto Return feature which is turned off by default. You need to enable this!
The solution
Turn 'ON' Auto Return, by doing the following:
Log in to your PayPal account at https://www.paypal.com. The My Account Summary page appears.
Click the Sellers preferences link at the bottom right side to enter the Settings section for your account.
Under Website Preferences click Update and the Website Payment Preferences page appears.
Alternatively, click this link here: https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_profile-website-payments once you have logged into your PayPal account.
Under Auto Return for Website Payments, click the 'On' radio button to enable Auto Return. In the Return URL field, enter any valid URL of yours. This can be your store's homepage URL for example.
Importantly: the URL you enter here does not matter, the URL will automatically be set during payment, to the 'Thank You' page of your store. As such, if you have more than one store, simply pick the URL of any - as the correct URL will be used instead. This only needs to be a valid URL to be able to be saved by PayPal.
From here, the customer will automatically be redirected within 10 seconds. Do note that if the customer happens to immediately close the browser or change the page - then there is a chance the they do not reach your order page. That said, it's now likely that the majority of your orders will be tracked.
Scroll to the bottom of the page, and click the Save button.
And you're done!
(NOTE: If you do not see the "My Account Overview" in PayPal and you have a special Business PayPal account, then your link may be called "Preferences" which will appear under the "Website Payments Standard and Express Checkout" section.)