The Oracle ATG Web Commerce platform includes a business tracking feature that lets you define a business process as a series of stages, track activity within the business process, and report on the activity for a specified time frame. In Oracle ATG Web Commerce, we’ve defined the lifecycle of an order (through the point the customer checks out) as a business process, allowing you to track stages in the shopping process from browsing, to adding items to the shopping cart, to completing shipping and billing information, to final check out. You can use the information gathered by tracking the stages of the shopping process to understand better how your customers react to their experience with your sites. For example, if reports show that many customers are abandoning their purchases at the stage where you display the shipping price, that may be an indication of poor or confusing application page design, or undesirable pricing schemes. You can also use shopping process tracking to modify a customer’s experience. For example, you could offer special promotions to customers who stall at a particular point in the shopping process.

For more information about business process tracking, including information about how to create new business processes, see the Defining and Tracking Business Processes chapter in the ATG Personalization Programming Guide