E.piphany will this week announce a new addition to its line-up of analytic applications which it claims will help businesses get a better insight of their web-based customers and integrate that knowledge with their internal IT systems. It says its E.piphany e.4 for E-Commerce will enable companies to identify customer preferences and sales averages in order to create the right pricing policies and product offerings. It says it will also enable them to understand how web sales affect traditional sales and to understand how to serve up products over the web that are tailor-made to individual customers’ wants and needs.
In the past, said Scott Dunlap, VP of e-commerce solutions for E.piphany, applications have been available which typically only allow businesses to carry out web log analysis, for example, the number of click throughs from page to page. But he claims E.piphany e.4 for E-Commerce is the first application that lets firms integrate their web commerce data with the rest of their enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource pLANning data. It also enables companies to bring in data from external sources, such as Acxiom Data Network demographic data, to get a better handle on their customers likely buying patterns and preferences according to region, age, sex, income and so on.
The application is part of the company’s E.piphany e.4 product suite, announced in January. The latter is a combined set of data extraction, loading, and transformation tools; a Sequel 7.0 or Oracle datawarehouse and a series of 16 web-based analytic applications in one bundle. Being able to analyze the web site is just one thing, said Dunlap, but what most people are interested in is web stickiness, the dynamics of loyalty and retention. He added: ‘We’re offering a complete view of the customer, instead of just giving businesses access to a small isLANd of information.
