Urchin is capable of extensive e-commerce reporting in conjunction with its standard web traffic reports. To accomplish this, two basic elements are required:
- Shopping cart software that produces activity logs in the ELF/ELF2 format (many can be configured to do so).
- The Urchin E-commerce Module, which is available as an add-on to any Urchin 5.x license.
To set up a Profile for ELF/ELF2 processing, use the Profile Setup Wizard in the Urchin admin interface and choose Profile type E-commerce. In the Log Source Wizard (which you will be taken through in the Profile setup process), you will need to specify two Log Sources - the standard website access log, and the ELF log.
ELF: To process existing ELF logs with Urchin requires only that you set LogFormat in the Log Source to ELF (or auto), and that the Visitor Tracking method in the Profile for the site be set to IP-ONLY.
ELF2: To use ELF2 you must configure your shopping cart software to generate log entries formatted as shown below. The ELF2 log format is based on the ELF log format and specification. Some additional fields were added to improve visitor tracking. Any fields containing internal tab characters must be quoted.
The transaction line starts with an exclamation character '!' and contains the following fields separated by tabs:
!orderid remote host IP (as given by %h in NCSA extended/combined log format) time (as given by %t in NCSA extended/combined log format) store sessionid total tax shipping billcity billstate billzip billcountry cs_useragent cs_cookie
The item line does not start with an exclamation character and contains the following fields separated by tabs:
orderid remote host IP (as given by %h in NCSA extended/combined log format) time (as given by %t in NCSA extended/combined log format) productcode productname variation price quantity upsold cs_useragent cs_cookie