If you have an eCommerce project and have installed Yahoo! Web Analytics, or you haven’t but you are thinking about implementing it I drop you some interesting tips about the Merchandising Report.
The Merchandising report it’s an awesome additional reporting solution if you already have the eCommerce report installed.
With the Yahoo! Web Analytics Merchandise Report you will be able to track not just the regular stuff from each sale like the individual products your customers preview, add to their shopping cart and purchase but also it allows you to define categories for your products, create custom reports, and update your reports to reflect cancelled orders or changes to order amounts by sending API requests to the system, and even doing up selling / cross selling analysis. You can also upload your individual products costs and calculate how each campaign contributes to your profits.
Yahoo! Web Analytics implementation is pretty simple if you, at least, take a look at the manual 
. The merchandising report has the very same logic, you simple add functions to your tracking code like:
Action;
DocumentGroup;
Amount; setAmounts records the total price of a product (i.e., the individual price of an item multiplied by the total number of units of the respective item).
OrderId;
Discount;
Tax;
Shipping;
SKU; Corresponds to the specific products you wish to track. The product SKU information is usually expressed as a function employed by your shopping cart. However, it can also be expressed as a constant (e.g., TEN114/S/03)
It is important to mention that each Yahoo! Web Analytics function is used to inflate a function from your shopping cart. Since shopping carts have different setups, you need to be familiar with the functions used in your shopping cart.
Another interesting feature is “Tracking viewed products“. By adding the ‘PRODUCT_VIEW’ action to your action function, as in the following example, you can track how often potential customer view your products and which products are the most popular.
YWATracker.setAction(“PRODUCT_VIEW”);
YWATracker.setSKU(“H84963422″);
If you wanted to track more product views at the same time you can just do the following:
YWATracker.setAction(“PRODUCT_VIEW”);
YWATracker.setSKU(“H84963422;H09273923″);
Another feature that you will love is ADD TO CART TRACKING. By activating this feature (you simply add the ADD_TO_CART action to your action function, as in the following example) you can track which products your visitors added to their online shopping cart.
YWATracker.setAction(“ADD_TO_CART”);
YWATracker.setSKU(“H84963422″);
Important: The SKU does not have to include a letter and eight digits. It can be any combination of letters and numbers that you use to identify your products.
So we measured the viewed products, the added to cart products and now you can also track the Purchased products. To do so you simply activate the Sale action (01) action, as in the following example:
YWATracker.setAction(“01″);
YWATracker.setSKU(“H84963422″);
YWATracker.setUnits(“3″);
YWATracker.setAmounts(“300.00″);
YWATracker.setAmount(“EUR300.00″);
YWATracker.setOrderId(“123xxx”);
If the tracked currency is important to you, let me suggest you to take a look at this link where you will find the total currencies supported by Yahoo! Web Analytics
To enter the price of your purchased products, you need to use the setAmounts function. Unlike the setAmount function, the setAmounts function does not need to have the currency code entered, as the currency is inherited from the setAmount function.
You can also track more products purchased at the same time:
YWATracker.setAction(“01″);
YWATracker.setSKU(“H84963422;H09273923″);
YWATracker.setUnits(“3;1″);
YWATracker.setAmounts(“300.00;50.00″);
YWATracker.setAmount(“EUR350.00″);
YWATracker.setOrderId(“123xxx”);
One fantastic thing in Yahoo! Web Analytics is that the Tracking code has a very simple logic that it is replied in all the tracking functions. So once you understand the basics is not hard at all implementing another features.