Tracking Events

Business Justification

Event tracking in Commerce solutions drives a great deal of intelligence and insights into your day to day commerce operations. All systems designed to capture this tracking information provide analytical insights that help you drive conversions through understanding the user behavior on your commerce solution.

OrderCloud’s role as a composable aspect of a solution is to govern the transaction validation and capture of the order. There is no intent to be an analytics solution because there are many outstanding options in the marketplace. Our role with analytics is to be available for you to transmit information to those systems and be a good citizen of your composed solution.

With that said, we are introducing a new event into OrderCloud: Tracking Events.

While webhooks have existed since the beginning of OrderCloud, they can at times be too tactical to support workflows from the business use case perspective. Tracking events fall into this category. Our events have hydrated models of the information necessary for quality tracking. With an order submit you’ll get a payload that contains the Order, all the LineItems, the Products on those LineItems, as well as User information. The same scenario plays out with the other supported events.

The first iteration of this feature comes with a coupled configuration with Sitecore’s outstanding products Send & Discover. What this means for you is that the system infrastructure to queue and process the volume of events is in place and supported by us. It also means we have a subscriber that will listen for the published topic and transform it into the targeted systems. You get this without any effort on your part. Automatically feed all the information you need to manage email campaigns, abandoned cart management, product recommendations and personalized shopping experiences.

The second iteration will allow for you to configure an external endpoint for the publishing of these events. While we believe our Sitecore products to be the best of breed we maintain a strong philosophy of agnostic composability. You can evaluate your current solutions and determine the best approach to fulfill on your commerce solutions.

Some may ask why support this on the server side when all these system have good JavaScript beacons and APIs available. The answer is flexibility. You can offload some development time, reduce the noise from the browser, avoid complicated 3rd party cross site scripting restrictions in the browser, and stop fighting with the tracking blockers that proliferate the web. Plus, you may not even be operating from a browser. It’s a new convenience for your implementation discretion.

Add a connection from OrderCloud

Note: This feature is only available to current Sitecore customers.

You must configure tracking integrations via the OrderCloud portal. The UI to configure tracking integrations will be displayed only when the following criteria have been met:

Once the above has been performed, you will now have access to the Connection menu item.

This is where you will be able to set a connection with Sitecore Send or Sitecore Discover.

For Sitecore Discover

For Sitecore Send

To add a new connection in OrderCloud:

New Properties

TrackingEvent

{
  "ID": "",
  "EventType": "UserLoggedIn" | "LineItemAdded" | "LineItemUpdated" | "OrderSubmitted",
  "ClientID": "",
  "Name": "",
  "ConfigData":""
}

New Endpoints

For more information, see Tracking Events API Reference

Triggered Events

Transition an OrderCloud user from anonymous to authenticated

Users on a shopping web site are either shopping anonymously or they are authenticated. OrderCloud has the ability to track the users in both these scenarios and provide a mechanism for stitching the anonymous events with the authenticated ones in order to make sure the system you are integrating with has a complete picture of the user journey.

In order to enable this, you need to follow certain prescribed steps in your web site.