In approximately two weeks from now Avail will gradually begin rolling out new features on Avail SaaS. Approximately three weeks from now all customers will have received the update. The focus of the update is an overhaul of Metrics and a server side API.
Metrics
Metrics have been given an overhaul. The purpose of the redesign is to make Metrics more user friendly and transparent. Some measurements have received new names that should be easier to understand. The buttons have been moved around and grouped to make working with Metrics more streamlined.
Before logAddedToCart put a session-product only in the state added-to-cart and not clicked-on. Now logAddedToCart will put a session-product in both states, thus making the state added-to-cart a strict subset of clicked-on. This allowed removing some hard to understand measurements and giving others easier to understand names.
Grouping Templates
It is now possible to group templates into a single chart. As an example lets say that you have one template per main category on the product detail page and you want to see a unified chart for the performance of the recommendations on the product detail page. Then you select all the templates for the product detail page and check the Group Templates option which will result in a unified chart for the product detail page.
My Overview
My Overview is a new view that has been added. It is the first thing you see when you enter the Metrics area. The purpose is to give you a snapshot of the results over the selected time period.
Export Data
The Billing Info has been replaced with Export Data. This does an export of detailed metrics data. This data can readily be imported into Open Office, MS Excel and Google Spreadsheet for analysis.
Server Side API
A server side API has been added. Using JSON-RPC you can now invoke Avail from your servers. The purpose of this interface is to be able to use Avail for recommendations in order confirmation mails, call-centers, in-store kiosks and more. Due to the inherent latency of calls over the Internet, it is not advisable to use the server side API for high volume calls where low latency is critical, such as recommendations on web pages and newsletters.
Exclude Items in Shopping Cart
If this setting is checked and items added to cart is logged with logAddedToCart, items in a session's shopping cart will not be recommended to that session. To enable logging of non-recommendations added to cart, the TrackingCode argument has been made optional in logAddedToCart.
Do not hesitate to give us feedback on these new features and further suggestions.
/Henrik Schinzel
CTO Avail Intelligence
