Sales tracking issues
Sales tracking issues may be caused by technical changes to merchant’s websites where Virtual Shopping has been deployed or where merchant teams have made amendments to the way Virtual Shopping sales tracking has been implemented.
If you encounter an issue or want to test out changes you’ve made to how sales tracking is implemented, we recommend following these steps and checking out the linked resources.
1. Diagnose the issue
The Inspector Tool can be used to support testing and troubleshooting and lets you quickly spot a number of common issues with your Virtual Shopping implementation.
check this resource to learn how to use the Inspector Tool for checking the health status of various tracking events.
You can also check which eCommerce subfields are mandatory and which are recommended here in order to investigate any critical or warning issues found with the Inspector Tool.
eCommerce subfields are the mandatory items you'll need to provide to Virtual Shopping in order to ensure that Shopper Events can be tracked as intended.
Any payload with validation issues will need to be resolved by your development team.
2. Understanding tracking event validation issues
Product View
The Product View event gives experts an insight into which product a shopper has been viewing.
The most common causes of issues with this event include:
Price formatted as a string rather than a number.
Imagine URL not containing https.
Incorrect price being sent through in tracking, e.g. if a product is on sale, you'll need to update the product with the sale price.
Price missing.
Event not triggering for variants of a product, which is why the group SKU rather than the product's unique SKU (ID) should be provided.
Image URL or location URL not sent in tracking event.
Although image, name, price, image URL, and location URL aren't mandatory, if one is missing from the tracking event, it will revert to fallback. That means the info displayed in the Store App will be extracted from the Product Feed (based on the product's ID).
Product Purchase
The Product Purchase event shows experts which products a shopper has recently purchased.
The most common causes of issues with this event include:
Price formatted as a string rather than a number.
Purchase.subtotal is missing or is zero, which causes the sale to be recorded with zero as the value.
Quantity formatted as a string rather than a number.
Group SKU being used instead of the product's unique SKU (ID).
Incorrect tax amount.
Incorrect currency, which can lead to small discrepancies in reporting.
Current missing in the product's array.
Missing coupon info if a coupon was used.
Here are a couple of recommendations when it comes to testing this event thoroughly:
Category View
The Category View event allows product experts to see which product categories a shopper has been viewing.
The most common causes of issues with this event include:
Missing or incorrect "value".
Missing "type".
This event firing together with the View Tracking event.
Product Search
The Product Search event allows product experts to see which products a shopper has been searching for.
The most common causes of issues with this event include:
Missing or incorrect "value".
Missing "type".
Add to Basket
The Add to Basket event gives product experts a view into what the shopper currently has in their basket (before checkout).
The most common causes of issues with this event include:
The event falsely triggering multiple times.
Price formatted as a string rather than a number.
Quantity or basketQuantity formatted as a string rather than a number.
Group SKU being used instead of the product's unique SKU (ID).
Remove from Basket
The Remove from Basket event lets product experts see what shoppers have removed from their baskets.
The most common causes of issues with this event include:
The event falsely triggering multiple times.
Price formatted as a string rather than a number.
Quantity or basketQuantity formatted as a string rather than a number.
basketQuantity missing.
Group SKU being used instead of the product's unique SKU (ID).
The event only triggers from the View Cart page despite there being multiple other places where it's possible to remove a product.
3. Testing to see if a solution has been successful
Your dev team can use the Inspector Tool to check whether any changes they have made have resolved the tracking issues.
To ensure accurate testing, where your dev team:
(a) has a staging environment with a Klarna staging application ID deployed and;
(b) the environment replicates the Virtual Shopping implementation from production;
the recommendation is to fully test the events on staging (including the Purchase event).
If only the production environment is available, any fixes to the Purchase event should be tested with a live purchase.
All other tracking events excluding the Purchase event can be tested without the need for a live purchase.
If help from the Virtual Shopping technical support team is needed to test the Purchase event, we would need details for all of the following:
A low-cost product (or alternatively, we can search for one as a suggestion).
A discount code if possible (or as a requirement depending on the nature of the issues reported).
A customer test account for the website if required, i.e. where it's necessary to sign in in order to complete a purchase on the website.
A credit card with all associated details to complete the test purchase. (If this cannot be provided, the Virtual Shopping team will try to source a card.)
A convenient delivery dress where possible in case the order is processed quickly. (It's also possible to just use one of the store addresses listed in the Dashboard.)
If the Virtual Shopping team is making the purchase, to avoid the order being fully processed, we need a contact in the merchant team who will be able to cancel the order. We would need their name and email address to let them know when the order needs to be canceled.
If the Virtual Shopping team carries out the test, once the purchase has been made (and canceled), we'll review the findings and provide you with a summary.
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