This book is the first text written that is solely dedicated to explaining and exploring the subject of ecommerce analytics. The content is an unprecedented synthesis of experience and ideas, bringing together hard-learned knowledge about the business, technical, organizational, managerial, mathematical, scientific, artistic, and analytical aspects of delivering successful ecommerce analytics (and data science) in companies of all sizes. I wrote this book for analytics practitioners, managers, and leaders, as well as people who work with, who are studying, or who simply want to learn more about ecommerce and how to analyze it. It’s a multidisciplinary text that crosses a range of topics and contextualizes them under the idea of “ecommerce analytics” and thus unifies the content into a cohesive whole. I cover analytical concepts and theory, to applied mathematical and statistical methods, to analytical processes and organizations, to specific types of ecommerce analysis, to data modeling, integration, collection, storage, security, and privacy. I tried to be as ambitious and innovative in writing this text as the ecommerce industry, its leaders, and its workers are daily in their jobs. Thank you for reading my book.
First I’d like to thank Jeanne Glasser-Levine, Betsy Gratner, Cheri Clark, Amy Neidlinger, and the staff at Pearson who helped me produce this book. I’d also like to thank the following people (in random order): Thomas Davenport, Jonathan Corbin, Jeff Bezos, Brian Massey, Sid Probstein, Julio Gomez, Sergio Maldonado, Sean Hickey, Sarabjot Kaur, Peep Laja, Harpreet Singh, Shail Jain, Nick Kramer, Ants Anupold, Dave Weineke, Peter Gibson, Deepak Sahi, Jeff Evernham, Gary Rush, Vishal Kumar, Eric Valyocsik, Mike Taubleb, Dennis Mortensen, Gillian Ahouanvoheke, Kevin Rowe, Patrick McGinley, Ali Benham, Feras Alhou, Eric Fettman, Sergei Dvoynos, Amit Shah, Dave Munn, Jesse Harriott, Bart Schutz, Ton Wesseling, Raj Aggarwal, Jim Levinger, Tommy Walker, Justin Cutroni, Avinash Kaushik, Brian Clifton, Eric Dumain, Cesar Brea, Brett House, Olivier Titeca-Baeuport, Bala Iyer, Eric Colsen, Julien Coquet, Bob Mould, Jeff Checko, Bob Page, Jascha-Kaykas Wolff, Gary Angel, Kim Ann King, Eric Hansen, Gary Angel, Rand Schulman, Andrew and Luchy Edwards, Jim Sterne, Mark Zuckerberg, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, Josh James, and you.