HitBox Shows Who's Buying What

In the weeks before Father's Day, men's clothing retailer Brooks Brothers promoted gifts on its Web site and through an E-mail marketing campaign. Like many online retailers, Brooks Brothers was able to measure Web traffic as the holiday approached. But unlike most retailers, it knew what shoppers bought and how much they spent.

That's because Brooks Brothers uses WebSideStory Inc.'s new HitBox Commerce hosted application, which collects data about customers' purchases and combines it with clickstream data for analysis. "It's been pretty helpful in terms of getting information down to product-level sales, which is what's really important to a retailer," says Nelson Sanchez, E-commerce marketing director for Brooks Brothers, in New York.

Clickstream data, when collected and analyzed, can answer such questions as how many people visit a Web site and what content they viewed. Several products, including HitBox Enterprise and NetIQ's CommerceTrends, perform this function.

HitBox Commerce, unveiled last week, takes the next step by combining clickstream data with purchase data recorded by retail transaction systems. Brooks Brothers found that the average customer who responded to its Father's Day promotions spent about $100. The best-selling products were ribbon belts and Irish linen sport shirts, and the best cross-selling products were flat-front chino pants and pleated chino pants. "These are trends I would never have discovered without HitBox," he says. That knowledge will help the retailer determine what to sell at what prices for future Father's Days.

Brooks Brothers assessed other products, priced at $100,000 to $200,000, before trying HitBox. At a starting price of $1,500 monthly, Sanchez says the HitBox reports are less customizable than some other products. "But for the money," he says, "it's a great tool."