Visualization and analysis of clickstream data of online stores for understanding Web merchandising

Clickstreams are visitors' paths through a Web site. Analysis of clickstrea ms shows how a Web site is navigated and used by its visitors. Clickstream data of online stores contains information useful for understanding the eff ectiveness of marketing and merchandising efforts, such as how customers fi nd the store, what products they see, and what products they purchase. In t his paper, we present an interactive visualization system that provides use rs with greater abilities to interpret and explore clickstream data of onli ne stores. This system visualizes the effectiveness of Web merchandising fr om two different points of view by using two different visualization techni ques: visualization of sessions by using parallel coordinates and visualiza tion of product performance by using starfield graphs. Furthermore, this sy stem provides facilities for zooming, filtering, color-coding, dynamic quer ying and data sampling. It also provides summary information along with vis ualizations, and by maintaining a connection between visualizations and the source database, it dynamically updates the summary information. To demons trate how the presented visualization system provides capabilities for exam ining online store clickstreams, we present a series of parallel coordinate s and starfield visualizations that display clickstream data from an operat ing online retail store. A framework for understanding Web merchandising is briefly explained. A set of metrics referred to as micro-conversion rates, which are defined for Web merchandising analysis in our previous work (Lee et al., Electronic Markets, 2000), is also explained and used for the visu alizations of online store effectiveness.