We are the Product

We are the Product
By Anonymous | October 24, 2022

E-commerce companies want to sell you something, but they really want your digital personas as their bonus. E-commerce websites made a fortune in the past two years with YoY growth above 20% from 2020 and it’s only expected to increase from here on out. With all of this potential revenue floating around, it’s no wonder that e-commerce websites spend millions analyzing their customer behavior in order to figure out the secret recipe that causes a user to make a purchase.

After establishing a product flow and generating some revenue, the next idea that e-commerce companies have is user tracking behavior. Understanding why some people make purchases and using that data to influence those who have not purchased their product is the fastest way to grow their revenue. There are a few companies that are big in the space such as Google Analytics, Pendo, Mixpanel and Amplitude, but the one this blog will focus on is Heap. The core feature of Heap is its “Autocapture” technology which is advertised by Heap as “Heap provides the easiest and most comprehensive way to automatically capture the user interactions on your site, from the moment of installation forward. A single snippet grabs every click, swipe, tap, pageview, and fill — forever.” This data would give e-commerce companies the ability to analyze their user base and understand how to better advertise and market themselves in order to increase their revenue by moving the needle of the non-converted purchasers to become buyers. This in turn reveals a third source of revenue for these companies, the user behaviors themselves.

Here’s the basic flow for understanding how Heap works. First, you go and create a sign-up to get access to your company’s environment. After you sign-up you’re given a random “environment_id” which is a random integer value. You use this with their javascript snippet to push data from your website to the Heap Platform. Once you’ve installed the Heap javascript snippet (takes two seconds) you’ll start to see your users flood in through the Heap system.

From here you can define any particular event you are looking for to analyze it more carefully. Want to see how many users looked at a pop-up on your site before making a purchase, that’s easily done. Want to see how many users came from search companies like Google or Bing, that’s easily done. Want to see the geographic location of where your users are located, that’s also easily done. Through this tool you can get a one-stop shot to answer almost all of your analytical needs to understand your users and therefore take actions to nudge your users into a particular behavior. For example, say that you notice through the Heap dataset that if your users are exposed to certain pop-ups they’re 90% more likely to make a purchase on that pop-up. Well now you’ll show that pop-up to all of your users to see how much more revenue that generates. All of this is done with ease and that’s what makes this tool incredibly powerful and terrifying.

The privacy and ethical concerns around these companies (Google Analytics, Pendo, Mixpanel, Amplitude and Heap) are numerous. First, when visiting company websites that utilize these types of tracking companies, the mention of them is often small within the Cookie Banner consent and oftentimes there’s so much information in these cookie banner consent that it’s hard to know what each script is doing. Second, there’s no option to opt-out of having these companies track your usage around the company website unless you’re using an ad-blocker as that was found to prevent these companies’ snippets from running. Third, without going through and reading the privacy policy of these companies it’s hard to know what that data collection could be used for. The policies surrounding these companies are often vague, and are left open to interpretation. The ethical implications revolve around consent and whether there was an adequate amount of informed consent from the user as a data subject to be used in this regard for analysis later on.

All of these details point to the new future for e-commerce companies, where the product they’re selling is actually secondary to what they desire. What they really want is our data interacting with their website. All of those clicks, scrolls, form fill in are valuable to them in order to market their next product and idea for us to purchase. In this ever increasing advertising world, we must stay wary that the product we are purchasing isn’t at the cost of our digital personas.