CCBill has developed a portal to help merchants analyze data produced by payments to spot purchasing patterns and other trends that can tie past transactions to future business strategy.
"Merchants can see how their campaigns are running so they can make changes on a daily or weekly basis," says Jason Kirk, vice president of product development for CCBill.
The Tempe, Ariz.-based e-commerce services provider's new product is called FlexStats. FlexStats resides within CCBill's online Admin Portal, which is able to mine, aggregate and track payments data. CCBill also offers an application programming interface for merchants and other developers to customize payments technology.
FlexStats is debuting with two new recurring reportsmerchant transactions and affiliate transactions. The reports are designed to allow online merchants or affiliate managers to view and analyze payment transactions to see how consumers are paying and whether a promotion prompted the sale.
"We are starting to track more information about consumers and their buying patterns," Kirk says.
FlexStats displays, in graph form, the current day's income and the previous day's incomealong with data on weekly, monthly or year-to-date purchases. The date range can be plotted by transaction type, payment type, region or currency.
"You can find out how many payments you took, and how many transactions came during specific intervals," Kirk says. "You can also look at payment types such as ACH, credit card or European payments."
FlexStats free to CCBill merchants and affiliates. The company did not release uptake stats or names of merchants that are using the product.
CCBill generally pursues online businesses that sell physical goods over the Internet, subscription-based websites and other e-commerce businesses. Its other services include processing for recurring payments and single payments, as well as electronic invoicing, fraud protection, mobile payments and affiliate marketing services.
The amount of information about a consumer and his or her intent that's revealed by payments is growing, and can be used to personalize other merchant tasks such as cross marketing, sales and risk, Kirk says.
"The market's never been in a better situation to track consumer behavior," says Andy Schmidt, a research director at CEB TowerGroup. "If a merchant can get a consumer to buy just one more item on every [shopping session], that would drive substantial results."
A number of payment companies are tying advanced data to other merchant services.
Other strategies include Cardlytics' use of transaction-driven marketing.
