Jan Rychter: blog (electronics, programming, technology)

Fablitics Launch

2014-11-04

We have just launched Fablitics — our friendly business intelligence and E-commerce analytics solution.

The driving idea behind Fablitics is that only meaningful numbers and graphs should be shown in business intelligence software. We tried to understand which numbers are important and can help decision making, and which bring little value and only confuse.

Early on we noticed that many analytics-type products show lots of data, but most of that data isn’t related to actual business.

Let’s take an example: page views and visits in an online store. They are related to the business, but very remotely. Estimating performance based on page-views could be compared to estimating the performance of a supermarket by the number of cars in the parking lot. Sure, that number is correlated with supermarket sales. Yes, probably the more cars there are in the lot, the better. Yes, the days when there is more traffic will likely bring in more revenue. But the relationship is too weak to allow meaningful conclusions.

So, when designing Fablitics, we decided to focus on fundamental business concepts: customers, products, sales. Instead of showing the number of page views, we count customers that visit the store. We determine which customers enter the store for the first time, and which are returning. We know how much each customer purchased, and we also know how the customer was referred to us, so we can put a monetary revenue value on advertisement campaigns.

All this is based on a rethinking of what analytics software should do. In our opinion, as long as the purpose is to improve the business, it should be strongly rooted in business concepts.

If you run an online store, you can sign up now for a free trial http://fablitics.com/ — no credit card required.