Publications

We just published a nice case study on business intelligence / web analytics at MEC that might interest the KDD audience.
MEC (Mountain Equipment Co-op) is Canada's leading supplier of outdoor gear and clothing, similar to REI in the US.
The case study highlights many interesting findings from their web site, that are deeper than what you usually see, including:

• The further away customers live from an MEC retail store, the more money they spent online
• Analysis of customer postal codes generated a geographical heat map that revealed "hot" areas for future physical store sites
• A change from free shipping to flat-fee shipping resulted in a 6.5 percent increase in total sales and 18 percent increase in average sales per order
• Customers who increased their purchase level from under $200 to over $200 accounted for 8.4 percent of the revenues and had unique identifying characteristics, which will help MEC target future migrators
• Robot/Crawler removal was critical to get correct statistics
• Visits that included a search generated more than twice as much revenue as visits that did not; moreover, if the last search in a session was successful, that visit generated almost three times as much revenue as visits that included no search at all
• About one in thirty failed searches used one of six keywords
• Product affinity analysis (associations) identified significant cross-sell opportunities that were not currently offered on the site