Uncovering patterns in cybershopping

Academics and practitioners alike have been arguing about whether the Inter net brings a revolutionary change in the fundamental way we do business or if it simply offers a new distribution channel and communication medium. Re gardless of the answer to that debate, one thing is certain: the Internet p rovides managers with an enormous amount of customer information that was p reviously unavailable. Thus, the new struggle has been to manage this infor mation and to use it accurately and efficiently to measure customers, trend s, and performance. However, the volume of this data has overwhelmed many e -commerce managers. As a result, e-commerce managers have been focusing on aggregate level summary statistics rather than fully leveraging their data. Using commonly available clickstream data, this article discusses the bene fits of separating an individual customer's buying behavior into simple pat terns of visits and purchasing conversion. This analysis of the buying proc ess allows us to more carefully examine the relationship between store visi ts and purchasing behavior.