3 ms·

If I am understanding correctly, if my BI folks want to report on things like order total or order sub total, or order sub total + shipping, or order sub total

by modoc 6y ago

If I am understanding correctly, if my BI folks want to report on things like order total or order sub total, or order sub total + shipping, or order sub total + tax, or presumably anything about the contents of the order (SKUs, quantities, per item pricing, price adjustments, coupons and promotions, etc...) instead of capturing a "order submitted" event, we'd have to capture every add to cart, every cart pricing recalc operation, shipping address added, shipping method selected, shipping cost added to order, shipping method changed, new shipping cost added to order, etc... as separate events? And have the smarts to generate reports using the final selected shipping method (for example) for calculations? For an average-ish B2C order that could be dozens of events, and for a complex B2B order that might easily be hundreds of events.

cedricd 6y ago
It's not quite that granular. I was more responding to the idea that there can't be a source of truth for these activities. We actually have several e-commerce companies using our platform (with decently high volume). In practice we tend to see events like 'completed order' 'shipped order' 'product added to cart' 'order delivered'. I.e. they're all very discrete differentiated steps in the process. There's a bit of an art between when to make a new activity and when to add it as metadata on an existing one. A completed order will more likely have 'discount code' as a feature than 'discount code applied' as an activity for example. Your order completed event could have total amount along with tax, shipping, etc costs that add up to the total. It depends on the analyses you want to generate. We do see things like an order submitted event with the total, num products purchased, discount code on it, and a separate 'purchased product' event with individual product price, sku, etc. Once can do things like MRR and another could let you identify best selling skus or product categories. Happy to chat more offline if you want to dive into the specifics for your use case. We love digging into what sorts of analysis someone wants to do and figuring out which activities make sense https://calendly.com/ahmed-narrator/30min-1 https://calendly.com/ahmed-narrator/30min-1
mst 6y ago
I think the point is that you can choose your own granularity, and that it tries to make things fast no matter that choice.

by modoc 6y ago

cedricd 6y ago

It's not quite that granular. I was more responding to the idea that there can't be a source of truth for these activities. We actually have several e-commerce companies using our platform (with decently high volume). In practice we tend to see events like 'completed order' 'shipped order' 'product added to cart' 'order delivered'. I.e. they're all very discrete differentiated steps in the process. There's a bit of an art between when to make a new activity and when to add it as metadata on an existing one. A completed order will more likely have 'discount code' as a feature than 'discount code applied' as an activity for example. Your order completed event could have total amount along with tax, shipping, etc costs that add up to the total. It depends on the analyses you want to generate. We do see things like an order submitted event with the total, num products purchased, discount code on it, and a separate 'purchased product' event with individual product price, sku, etc. Once can do things like MRR and another could let you identify best selling skus or product categories. Happy to chat more offline if you want to dive into the specifics for your use case. We love digging into what sorts of analysis someone wants to do and figuring out which activities make sense https://calendly.com/ahmed-narrator/30min-1 https://calendly.com/ahmed-narrator/30min-1

mst 6y ago

I think the point is that you can choose your own granularity, and that it tries to make things fast no matter that choice.