Everything we know about customers from their site activity is stored in their customer profiles. Determining what information to record for each customer is an important part of designing the store. The profile in the Pioneer Cycling store records a customer’s:
name and contact info
shipping and billing information
credit card numbers
checkout preferences
wish lists or gift registries
shopping preferences and items recently browsed
personal information such as gender, birthday, and clothing sizes
We used several methods of gathering profile information from users in the Pioneer Cycling site. The registration process asks users to answer specific questions. Also, we implemented scenarios to record profile information that is then used to target promotions and specific products to users. For example, the “Browsing” scenario records every item or category that a customer browses. The “BuildProfile” scenario monitors the products a customer browses or adds to the shopping cart to determine what classes of product interest the customer. For more information on these scenarios, see Appendix A, Pioneer Cycling Scenarios.