Visitor Tracking

[brassandsilver]

So, here is something odd. We noticed some sudden discrepancies in our visitor tracking and orders in progress that began on the 14th of this month. For example, we had customers who were live on our website with an order in progress, but the Not Completed order log didn't display any activity for them at all. In addition, our visitor count on the 3dCart reports dropped extremely, and incorrectly. The numbers don't match any of the totals on Google Analytics at all. I submitted a ticket about this, and just got this response: "For performance reasons we have made some recent changes to our system. If you reach 25 concurrent visitors on your site, the stats will not calculate any longer. So, if you reach 25 visitors, number 26 and higher will not be reported to the stats. Which would account for what you are seeing as drop, even though everything else will appear as normal, such as the number of orders you received."
Basically our data will be wildly inaccurate from this point forward then??? I don't even know how to respond to that. Is everyone else seeing this happen?

[Go Live]

I to received the same canned STORY

We have recently noticed that the LiveChat plugin we offer was causing some dramatic slowness on our merchant's sites. After investigating this thoroughly we discovered that the problem was being caused specifically by the LiveChat plugin's "Site Visitor Monitor" feature, which allows your to track your visitor activity while they are browsing through your store.

The Site Visitor Monitor itself was causing slowness whenever there were more than 25 concurrent visitors for it to track. Therefore, we have placed a limit on the visitor monitor so that it will return a message similar to the following:

"The monitor is not currently available. The number of open sessions exceeds the allowed limit"

To be absolutely clear, this will NOT affect the number of visitors you are allowed to have on your site, nor will it affect your ability to open a chat session with your customers should the 25 visitor limit be exceeded. The only aspect of your site this will affect is your ability to use the Site Visitor Monitor portion of the LiveChat plugin.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Unfortunately, the LiveChat plugin is a 3rd party developed product and our control over its functionality and performance is somewhat limited. Therefore we have elected to place a cap on the amount of users the Site Visitor Monitor will work with in order to avoid limiting other aspects of your sites.

Now while this may sound fair it is total BULL. We NEVER get more then 6 visitors and while I am flatered by the supposed visits they claim we are having the daily sales tell us the story is total crap.
Cann"t we just be honest, The paying customer does not appeciate being lied to.
And yes the visit tracking has indeed jumped off a cliff from 400 to 4 visits a day. Things are not adding up at all.

On another note my monthy bandwith went from 3gig - 35gig with less sales.

I am at ALL.

At this point I don't need a sugar coated explanation I just need a fair and honest solution for all of us.

Anybody else having tracking or bandwith problems?

[Go Live]

Final word on this matter

For those wondering what happened to the tracking in the chat program.
It now seems that 3dcart has decided to disable the tracking feature of the chat program instead of better utilization of clients per server. Here is the final words on the subject and support has closed the ticket.

We are constantly monitoring the websites within the 3dcart system to ensure the best possible performance. Recently we have found the Live Visitor Monitor within the 3dLiveChat program may be causing performance issues. Due to this when we notice any performance drop on a site we will disable the Live Visitor Monitor within the 3dLiveChat program.

You will be able to tell if the Live Visitor Monitor has been disabled because you will see the following message:

"The monitor is not currently available. The number of open sessions exceeds the allowed limit"

To be absolutely clear, this will NOT affect the number of visitors you are allowed to have on your site, nor will it affect your ability to accept a chat session with your customers when this occurs. The only aspect of your site this will affect is your ability to use the Live Visitor Monitor portion of the LiveChat plugin.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause however; we feel it is more important to limit a small aspect of the LiveChat program rather than having its behavior affect your site.

We are continuing to monitor the performance of the websites on the 3dcart system and will be sure to make any necessary adjustments that will guarantee the best performance of your site.

Thank you for choosing 3DCart.

[piaf]

If you want the capability to track live users on your site, you might want to look into Woopra.com. We use it and it doesn't seem to affect our store's performance at all.

[brassandsilver]

Thanks, piaf. We will check that out right away.

[brassandsilver]

If you want the capability to track live users on your site, you might want to look into Woopra.com. We use it and it doesn't seem to affect our store's performance at all.

Oh. My. Goodness. Thank you so much for suggesting Woopra. We have installed it, and I am already in love with it. We saw the traffic instantly, and Woopra seems to have lots of different settings that we will be able to play with. I feel much better now!:)

[piaf]

Yeah, it's a pretty slick little program. Glad I could help! :D

[piaf]

Oh, and supposedly they have a live chat feature built in, but I've never used it so I have no clue if it works well or not.

[brassandsilver]

Oh, and supposedly they have a live chat feature built in, but I've never used it so I have no clue if it works well or not.

That's funny that you said that. I actually logged onto the forum just so I could ask if you have used their live chat. We may give it a try, especially if it has an audible alert when a user initiates a chat session. That is one of our big dislikes with the current live chat plug-in. It is completely silent, so unless you are staring at the monitor the whole time there is no way to know if there is any activity.

Anyway, Woopra is definitely my new best friend! Thanks again.

[Toobusy]

Mine too! Thanks much for the link. Now I'm thinking of playing with the chat feature

[brassandsilver]

Hi again. So, we spent a few minutes today playing with the Woopra live chat feature. From the little bit of time we tried it, it was really easy. Best of all, any incoming messages or replies to come in the form of a pop-up box with an audible bleep so it is easy. Also, you can set it so that the Live Chat icon is only visible when you are online, and it just isn't there if you are offline. It has always bothered me that our existing live chat shows the offline status when it is off. Anyway, it is completely easy to toggle on and off, and there is no coding or anything to set it up, all you do is enter the widget menu in the settings panel, and check the boxes according to your preferences. Click update, and it is on. My only dislike was the way it appears on the site. The chat option is basically a very small box that displays over the bottom right corner of the web pages, so it might cover something that should remain visible. I will post an update after we spend more time with it, but so far I like what I see a lot.

[cekman]

I opened a ticket on this issue a week or so ago and have been going back and forth with support on it.

I really liked the View Visitors feature.

They told me at one point that I had 125 concurrent users on my site - Hah - that is so funny.

I told them they were crazy - My normal is 2-3 and when I send out a sales notice it might get to 15-20.

Support said that it is not just actual visitors that get counted - it's also google shopping, indexing, etc. etc.

I feel very strongly that they are calculating the open sessions incorrectly, or the sessions are getting 'closed' correctly.

However support insists that my site really is super busy and it is in my best interest to have it this way for performance.

Live Chat is 'free' for me because of the level I'm at - but if I was paying for it I would cancel it. As it is I would rather have more bandwidth than have this 'feature' that I can't uses as it was originally promoted to me.

There seems to be an underlying performance issue that they are worried about (and I'm glad they track performance) - but maybe the solution is a different Live Chat program completely.

I finally gave up on the back and forth with support. I would be thrilled if my site had 25+ consecutive users 24/7 - but it doesn't and I truly feel they are wrong on this one. But what do I know.

[brassandsilver]

I agree with you on all points, cekman, but after checking out Woopra as piaf suggested, I am no longer worrying about it. At this point we have just stopped using all of the 3dCart stats in favor of the fabulous data provided by Woopra. Next week we plan to switch to the Woopra live chat as well, since from the limited testing we have done with it, Woopra chat is far superior to the current Live Chat. We don't pay extra for any of the 3d plug-ins either, so it would be nice if these included features gave us what we need, but at this point they don't. Woopra is only costing us $49.50 per year at the service level we selected, but the data we have gotten from using it has already been worth more than that.

What would be truly ideal is if 3dCart integrated with Woopra so it could be even better. I think I will suggest this on the User Voice portal and see if it goes anywhere. If I ever have any more usable votes, that is...

[redonion]

VERY nice! Thank you for sharing that info! :)

[Burnspot]

After reading this thread, I just signed up our site for Woopra on the Bronze Plan...all I can say is wow...it really looks like a nice app packed with data!

The iPhone app is icing on the cake...very nice.

Thanks for the tip folks! :D