The MailChimp Ecommerce Tracking plugin is a new feature designed to help you measure the ROI of your email campaigns.  By syncing our MailChimp API with your Ecommerce shopping cart solution, you can now track when people click from your email campaigns, visit your website, all the way to purchase. Even better, MailChimp then aggregates the information and displays it on your MailChimp campaign report!

The Ecommerce Tracking plugin is a free add-on that is available for installation from your account.  We currently support Magento, Zen Cart, osCommerce and PrestaShop, or if you’re a developer, you can even create your own.

The plugin collects only the details of the order, and none of your customer’s private data.  (If you want to check it out for yourself, you can download the appropriate plugin and take a look at the code or bribe your web geek to do it.)  The details collected include:

• Order number
• Total amount
• Tax amount
• Shipping amount
• Product category
• Product id(s) and name(s)
• Quantity of each item
• Cost of each item

Once the add-on is installed (through your MailChimp account), we will automatically add some tags to links inside the campaigns you send. Then, those tags will be picked up by a plugin installed in your E-commerce store. The plugin will then track users who have followed the links in your campaign, and when a user completes a purchase, the plugin will quietly send the basic details of the order– products ordered, product categories, shipping, tax and order totals– back to us via an API call.

I want to emphasize that the installation and set-up process involves two critical steps. First, install the appropriate plugin on your e-commerce site. Second, activate the free add-on under your MailChimp account. The plugin will only be able to collect data if you complete both of these steps.

Be sure to check the box to “Add Ecommerce360 Tracking to all URLs” under advanced tracking options in step 2 of the campaign builder.

advanced tracking options