From version 1.5 of our Amazon Shopping Cart extension for Joomla we have added a new ability to track sales. Whenever a user clicks the button to check out through Amazon, the value of the sale is recorded, the date and time, the cart id, the purchase url, the items in the cart, plus the user id if they are logged in. The sales can be viewed in the Joomla admin and downloaded as a CSV file. This can be very useful if you want to reward your users for buying through your site, or if you just want to keep a track of sales.

You can view an example of the sales dashboard here

.If you want to see the details for an individual sale you can click on the cart id, and view the sale details page. This page shows the items bought, plus allows you to add some extra information of your own.

Confirming Sales

Once the user clicks the button to check out, they are referred to Amazon who handle the entire business of taking payment, and there is no callback to your site, so there is no way to confirm automatically whether the customer has actually bought the items that they checked out with. You will need to do this yourself though your Amazon affiliates account.

Options

The cart options allow you to choose whether to track sales by registered users only, by all users (registered and guest), or not to track at all, if you prefer.

If you want users to create an account on your site, there is an option to require customers to log in or create and account when they click the checkout button.

Customer Data

If the user is logged in, and you have chosen to track sales, the customer user id is recorded when they check out. The cart automatically links this to the Joomla user  profile, so it will display the user's name and email address when you view a sale. If you want to collect more information on the user when they register an account (such as address and phone) you can do this through the Joomla user profile plugin. Since the cart links the sale to the user profile you will be able to see the additional data too through the sale details.

If you are collecting customer data and tracking sales you probably need to have an explicit privacy policy on your site in order to comply with data protection laws.