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Why do the Traffic numbers in the Reports section sometimes seem right and other times they're definitely wrong? How can I have Sales numbers if I don't have Traffic numbers?

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When checking the Reports section (stathandler.cgi), sometimes the information seems accurate and other times it doesn't. Sometimes I get Sales numbers when I don't have any Traffic numbers. How is that possible?

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Solution ID: S04811

Sales numbers and Traffic numbers are tracked and processed differently and separate from each other.

The Sales numbers are generated from data captured directly from the ShopSite shopping cart at the time the order is placed.

To gather the Traffic numbers, ShopSite's Reports cgi checks your site's/server's webserver access log file each time the Reports section of ShopSite is opened. The log file is parsed, and when relevant hits are found in the file that pertain to your store, the information is stored in the ShopSite stat files.

Most servers rotate the webserver access logs on a regular basis to prevent the file from becoming too large. If you have not been to the ShopSite Reports menu for a few days and then when you go there it reports 0 (zero) traffic stats for a few days, this is likely because the webserver access log has been rotated in the meantime, so the data for those days was not available in the current webserver log that ShopSite is reading.

Some solutions to prevent or minimize the possibility of this happening again may be:

1) find out when your webserver access log is rotated, and make sure that you go to the Reports menu as soon before that time as possible so that all the data from the access log can be parsed before it is rotated.

2) if you have plenty of diskspace and your access logs aren't really getting that large before they are rotated (60MB to 100MB or larger is too large for ShopSite to parse), increase the time between rotations.

3) (more advanced, most likely to be handled by the hosting provider) create your own rotation script that preserves the last week (for example) of hits in the new log file. Choose a reasonable timeframe within which you know that most of your merchants will have checked their Reports at least once. Let your merchants know the time restrictions.

4) create a new, empty file and configure ShopSite's Reports feature to read this file as the webserver access log file, then use some other program that specializes in webserver traffic reporting to analyze your site traffic. Some examples of programs that specialize in this are Webalyzer, Urchin, AWStats, and Google Analytics.

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