When it comes to building a better Magento store, Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics are your best friend. In years past, Magento store operators had to rely on third-party BI and analytics tools.
But not anymore.
Magento Commerce comes off-the-shelf support with its very own BI suite, known as Magento Business Intelligence Essentials, Magento BI Essentials for short.
What is Magento BI Essentials
Is it right for you?
Why bother with it at all?
Get all the answers in the overview below.
Further reading: Understanding the Full Power of Magento BI
Magento BI Essentials is a native analytics suite that’s integrated with Magento Commerce. It grew out of Magento’s acquisition of RJMetrics, a leading BI company, in 2016. Shortly after this acquisition and a period of product development, Magento BI Essentials was launched in early 2017.
Magento BI Essentials is designed specifically for the needs of Magento eCommerce entrepreneurs and provides a powerful and flexible – yet easy-to-use – analytics solution.
It’s meant to be robust enough to provide great insights for those who are already familiar with analytics – but also to be approachable for merchants who are just getting started with commerce analytics.
In total, Magento BI Essentials provides five customizable, at-a-glance dashboards to help you measure the KPIs of your store, as well as over 100 customizable reports that can help you get deeper insights into the performance of your store.
Reports include:
Every report can be customized based on your needs, to give you more insights into the performance of your Magento store.
If you’re a Magento Commerce user, you get access to Magento BI Essentials free of charge. Take a look at this page to learn more and implement it on your Magento store.
However, if you’re using Magento Community Edition, you will not be able to get access to Magento BI Essentials unless you pay an additional fee. This fee is based on your Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV), and starts at $100/month.
Yes, that may seem steep. But trust us. The information you can uncover with an analytics tool like Magento BI Essentials is worth the investment.
If you need additional advanced features, you can upgrade from Magento BI Essentials to Magento BI Pro. Pricing for Magento BI Pro is customized for each user, but by upgrading, you can get even more features and benefits like:
You can get more details about the differences between these two products here.
For most Magento merchants, we think that Magento BI Essentials will provide you with plenty of features and reports – you don’t really need Magento BI Pro.
Wondering why you should use Magento BI Essentials at all? Here are a few of the benefits of doing so.
Still not sure whether or not you need to use Magento BI Essentials? Even if you use Magento Community Edition, you can get a free 7-day trial of this software. You can learn more and find out how to add it to your store here and start trying out its custom reports and analytics right away.
So go ahead. Give it a try. Whether you are running a large Magento store and are looking for ways to improve your website, or you’re launching a new store and are interested in maximizing your growth, the Magento BI Essentials platform is sure to be helpful.