“I need reports, statistics, or analytics about who was shopping, and browsing on my site.”

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Short Answer:

There are a few options available to you. 

The shopping cart has some stats under the REPORTS section.  This requires no effort on your part.  One of the more overlooked reports is the "heard about" feature that lets shoppers tell you how they heard about your website.

A second type of reporting is your typical 'website statistics' available from your hosting company. These are usually free, and require no setup on your part.

A third type is a 'website analytics' program which provides much greater depth.  Google Analytics is one of the most popular and free programs available today.  Other companies sell analytics programs, and are ultimately geared towards making you more money, and more profitable online.  These often (e.g. Google Analytics) require you to set something up.  This sometimes includes the option of 'ecommerce tracking' which identifies the sources of all your online store's revenues.  Please see the related article at the end to set up analytics/ecommerce conversion tracking.

Detailed Explanation:

While the shopping cart software contains many stats in its reports, you will find that the stats for the whole website will be very different in nature. So you will need to check with your web hosting company for additional stats, such as where people found, and how people got to, your website, and total site traffic.  Most web-hosting companies use a program like Awstats, Webalyzer, or Urchin. 

Highly sophisticated and detailed stats, for in-depth marketing analysis, are generally called analytics.  If you need this, we highly recommend using Google Analytics, which is nothing short of amazing, and happens to be free.  Google acquired the stats software Urchin, and now gives away this program that normally can cost hundreds, or thousands of dollars.  Some of these stats programs available today are not 100% compatible with our software, unless you are using our more powerful SEO plan.