Visitor tracking allows you to learn about visitor activity and trends on your website. It also provides a mechanism for you to check the results of your marketing campaigns, blogging, SEO and your other marketing and website optimization activities. In short, it provides you with intelligence as to how well your website is serving its purpose and what patterns/paths your visitors are following on your website and how long they “stay” on your website.

Visitor tracking also tells you where your visitors are coming from, what pages they visit, how they navigate through you website and what topics they find of interest. The intention is to find out what interests your visitors so you can fine-tune the content of your website to provide a more targeted source of information and to better serve your visitors and customers.

Furthermore, visitor tracking also captures search engine activity and provides a thorough analysis of which keywords are driving the most of traffic to your website.  Visitor tracking can also tell you how much of your traffic is direct, how much is coming from search engines and how much from referring websites. Advanced visitor tracking also lets you see the traffic originating from organic or natural search engine optimization and allows you compare that with any paid marketing campaigns. This way, you can fine-tune your content and marketing strategies to gain an better understanding of how to increase your online visibility and ultimately, result in more traffic.

Here are 3 popular visitor tracking systems:

StatCounter (www.statcounter.com) provides both free and paid services. You can choose to implement Statcounter in invisible mode meaning that there are no obvious links or counters on your web pages.

Clicky (www.getclicky.com) has picked up a significant amount of traffic over the last few months and provides a very comprehensive statistics.

Finally, you can always opt for Google Analytics, which is also free and also gives you great statistics and ties in beautifully with Google Paid Advertising (PPC).

Think of an e-commerce website as a storefront for products and/or services that you want to sell online. Your job is to convert your website visitor into actual buyers. You need to have plenty of appealing content and products on your site to attract search engines as well as to inform prospective clients.

Here are the main parts of an e-commerce site:

The online product catalog is the main place to store and manage the information about products or collections of products.

The shopping cart is a familiar interface buyers use to select products they want to buy. The shopping cart just holds information about the products that your customer is about to purchase and assists them with the checkout process.

The checkout system collects necessary payment information from the buyer, including shipping & billing addresses and credit card information or details of other payment mechanisms. It may also be configured to present shipping rates, taxes, coupons, or calculate other changes to arrive at the final price.

The payment gateway is a secure service that transfers payment and credit card information from your website to a merchant account provided by a bank or financial institution that handles online transactions. The gateway mechanism also handles any feedback from the bank, such as when a buyer has insufficient funds or is using an invalid credit card. The payment gateway is also tasked with validating that the credit card actually belongs to the user.

The merchant account is a special bank account that allows your website to accept online payments by debit or credit cards. Merchant account banks charge variable fees per transaction and transaction types, partially based on the bank’s assumption of risk to collect money on your behalf.

Finally, fulfillment is when the order is processed through the e-commerce website and results in a completed order that is shipped out.