Unlock New Transactional Insights with Cart Analysis in Amplitude

Uncover insights about customer transactions to better understand purchase behavior in Amplitude.

Inside Amplitude
October 18, 2022
Image of Michelle Lee
Michelle Lee
Senior Product Manager, Amplitude
Cart Analysis

The world of online commerce has evolved as basic checkouts have given way to more sophisticated in-app experiences, personalization, and marketplace offerings. The world’s most beloved brands today (see: Instacart) use product analytics to improve monetization, identify high-value customers, and launch campaigns to increase loyalty and retention.

Today, we’re introducing Cart Analysis, available natively inside our platform for self-serve ecommerce insight generation. This is a game changer for teams looking to unlock new insights about customer transactions to better understand purchase behavior in Amplitude.


Our customers have shared that when assessing their business performance, they want to understand things like:

  • What are our top-performing product categories?
  • How do different products convert through the checkout funnel?
  • What are the most popular product combinations?
  • How can we increase basket size through upsell opportunities?

To answer these questions, teams often had to rely on specialized data analysts who queried their data warehouses or leveraged 3rd party tools. At best, this was a bottlenecked process and at worst, left them in the dark. With Cart Analysis, Amplitude is changing this paradigm.

Alex Clark leads ecommerce and growth at Fender, one of the largest manufacturers of musical instruments. He shared:

“Cart Analysis is a game changer for us and unlocks all types of insights that would have required analyst time in other systems. We can now quickly answer in-depth questions including funnel conversions for different product types, distribution of products sold by price point, comparison of top products by categories, and more. We’ve already begun charting out site optimizations that will drive incremental growth for the business.”

Cart Analysis, powered by object arrays

Cart Analysis is powered by our new object array functionality in Amplitude. This new capability allows customers to send data as arrays of objects (see “Products” below), so that Amplitude can split out each attribute into a query-able item property (e.g., Products.Brand, Products.Categories). Rather than duplicating similar data across per-item events, customers can send item-level details with a single top-level event.

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Cart Analysis: unsplit vs. split data

Once the data splits are configured, building analysis is simple! Users start by selecting their purchase or transaction event, then quickly customize the query with item properties containing detailed product (object) information. Users can flexibly analyze results in the aggregate (e.g., total order volume or co-occurrence), as well as slice and dice by different dimensions such as brand, category, price, and SKU.

Cart Analysis is the first of a variety of applications of our new object array model. (Reach out to your success team if you have other potential use cases!) Cart Analysis is currently available as an Open Beta release in our enterprise plan. More information about the feature is available here.

To learn more about how Amplitude is used for ecommerce businesses, be sure to check out our Ultimate Guide for Setting up Analytics for Ecommerce

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About the Author
Image of Michelle Lee
Michelle Lee
Senior Product Manager, Amplitude
Michelle is a Senior Product Manager at Amplitude, focused on the core Analytics product. She most recently managed the release of Data Tables, a new tool for multi-metric, multi-dimensional analyses. Michelle grew up in the Bay Area and earned her MBA from MIT Sloan. Prior to joining Amplitude, she worked in sales strategy and operations at LinkedIn.