Survey for Zen Cart v2.0 Admin Dashboard

Greetings Zen Cart users!

We are working on the redesign of the Zen Cart Administration tool and would like you input on the "Dashboard" - The dashboard will be the first thing you see after entering the admin.

We are envisioning the ability to have various widgets to display summarized information, we'd like your ideas for those widgets.

What information is important to you when you need an overview of your business?

We'll be watching the responses for the next couple of weeks for some great ideas.

I'm pretty happy with the current Home screen.

I've made a couple of minor changes to the current screen, don't know if others would find these things useful -

-I've increased the Counter History to show the last 21 days of activity. It gives me a better picture of activity trends. A small graph of that info might be nice.

-I've also added the server up-time/server load info onto that screen. Current load is something I monitor often.

Ed

A sales summary widget would be nice. Something graph-like that shows number of sales and revenue.

I think dashboard widgets should be plugins, so that we have the flexibility to choose which work best for us, add new ones and share them with the community. :wink:

Iconography (for the menus) would be a Great addition to the Cart. The brain more easily stores images than words, so it would probably be easier for beginners to learn how to use the admin.

Generally speaking, I think it's good with as much data-mining as possible. For instance tools that would let you know when there's a medium to long term change in consumer behavior so you may track change's in the trend pattern of consumers, visitors.

I think Piwik has a nice sleek admin interface (although ZC has made me a fan of green..).

Thanks for the replies, but I think I must not have been clear in my request. We are asking what specific information widgets you would like to see in the default dashboard.

So ...

Are you looking for a quick site traffic check?
Last XX # of orders?
How many new orders?
Etc, etc.

I believe that I agree with kuroi in this
That the framework should be flexible if not also configurable from the admin to have 1, 2 ,3 ,or more block areas that can contain the information one finds useful...

You did not elaborate about what the structure will be, OOP, some incarnation of a RPG lang, or a light weight inclusion of a Crystal reports type - open source of course....

Where by a user can assemble their own displayed output through code or preferable a menu

No stock item is ever exactly what another needs or wants

Widget number 1
For a widget, I would specifically like one that tells me

1. How many debugfiles are in /cache
2. Displays the contents of the latest debug file

Widget number 2
Presents the hits and sales data in graphical form (I just find graphs easier to read trends on)

Widget 3
New orders (drect bank deposit is extremely common here, so being able to cmpare a quick list with bank statement would be a boon)
contains

1. order number
2. Date
3. amount
4. payment method

Thanks Nigel! We'll definitely keep those ideas in mind.

I would say it is understood that dashboard widgets should be plugins but it is also a given that there should 'default' or 'core' widgets supplied with a default setup. That would be the starting point for 'widgets' people can enable/disable at will.

With that said, I would like to see:

• Admin Template changer
• CSS based Mega Menu (such as seen here)
• Modules Viewer, what modules have been installed - including version and link to download page
• Pie Chart Viewer, could include various information that can be grouped by relationship to each other and is either pre-coded to display said relationships or allows one the ability to state which relationship groups one wants to see

Website Rob:

• Pie Chart Viewer, could include various information that can be grouped by relationship to each other and is either pre-coded to display said relationships or allows one the ability to state which relationship groups one wants to see
  Without getting caught up in technology or implementation, can you give some specific examples of what "data relationships" would be important to you and why?

Along with what is already displayed.(Stats, Order Status, New Customers, New Orders)

Thinking out loud, my ideas are:
Total Sales
Yearly Sales
Monthly Sales
Weekly Sales
(Maybe filtered by: Total, Customer, Customer Group (if featured))

Top Best Selling XX Products (XX = users selected quantity, i.e. 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 etc)
(Maybe filtered by, total, yearly, monthly, Weekly.. using a graphical representation of a products sales patterns?)

Search terms used > Top Search terms?

Most popular / visited non product content, i.e. ezpages, define pages.

If integrated to 2.0, the suggestion I made in the required features part of the forum, where customers can make comments (http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=171850 )
maybe a widget that shows Orders where a customer has made a comment / queried an order and an admin has not responded to it? Highlighting an admin need to review this order. If that makes sense? Although this could be done some other way, maybe have the Order Status automatically changed to 'Customer Alert' when a customer makes a customer comment on said order. But I digress.

Maybe a widget that displays top XX customers? By Total, Yearly, Monthly, Weekly??

Maybe a widget that shows the top XX registered customers that visit the site and browse the site, but don't checkout? (probs best suited to being an add-on?)

Number of Admin Accounts logged (on for large sites) That will only be visible to the Master Admin Account holder?? (probs best suited to being an add-on?)

Just ideas

So ...

Are you looking for a quick site traffic check?
Last XX # of orders?
How many new orders?
Etc, etc.

Ok. I'll try to be more precise, I would like to see widgets for,

• cash-flow
• no. of visits
• no. of units sold
• average time on site per visitor
• average visitor time on each page (no. of pages visited/total time spent on site)
• average time from visit to conversion (point of $ell)
• time spent on each individual c=path page
• most visited (c=path) page

Data dividable per day, month and year and downloadable for aggregated statistical analysis. Variance should be attached to each measure so that a trend line could be added..

DrByte:

Without getting caught up in technology or implementation, can you give some specific examples of what "data relationships" would be important to you and why?
Number of Visitors
Entry/Exit pages
Page Bounces
404's

Number of Sales
Cart completion
Cart Abandoned

As mentioned by dutchy:

Total Sales
Yearly Sales
Monthly Sales
Weekly Sales
(Maybe filtered by: Total, Customer, Customer Group (if featured))

Basically, taking information that is usually seen by itself and providing a way to compare it to other information that is related.

Think of a Pie Chart used for Profit & Loss Statements, where all related information is seen at a glance and easy to compare; especially if being able to compare this (day,month,year) Pie Cart to last (day,month,year) Pie Chart.

Giving people a way to Data Mine their own information, instead of having to used a 3rd party app, would not only be forward thinking, it would be a way to provide people with something they need but don't yet know it. :smile:

I would like to suggest a server status display.

Service Status
FTP: OK
Web: OK
E-Mail: OK

System Status
CPU: (17%)
RAM: (39%)
Disk: (43%)

MySQL Status
Traffic per hour
Received 2,963 MiB 5,800 KiB
Sent 2,099 MiB 4,110 KiB
Total 5,062 MiB 10 MiB

I think this will help the admin to notice if things start going wrong what to look at.

I understand this is not directly needed info for zen cart, but I think it could also be used as a trouble shooting tool.

Skip

I like a lot of the ideas already here. As some have already said, it'd be nice to have widgets that you can easily enable or disable, as what suits one user will not suit all. Then some widgets would be handy tools to have, that can use when you need them and then hide when you want to use something else, so it doesn't get too cluttered.

I think it'd also be handy to have some traffic demographics, so you can see:
What country the users are in
If they came in directly or through a referral like a search engine

Then also be able to see which demographic areas are looking at the site in general and also which products. Else see demographically who are looking at particular products.

Information as above would help to figure out what is popular in different worldwide regions. If the 'Cart Abandoned' was also available as mentioned above, then also showing demographics, it might indicate that all is well until the point of choosing shipping options. This might identify a problem with that which you would otherwise not know. So adding more shipping options could quickly lead to more sales conversions, etc

The site demographics would also help indicate where marketing is strong and working vs where it is not, so allow you the chance to target areas for improvement.

I know you can have external apps show you a lot of these type of traffic information, but thought it worthy of suggestion for perusal.

Also, sort of Admin section related and maybe possible already... perhaps I'm just lacking in my general ZC prowess. But is it not possible some way to change the status of multiple orders at once. Currently I seem to have to open each individual order to change it's status. When marking items as shipped for example. Maybe in a similar way to that which is used on the popular, yet ever more frustrating auction site that is so well known.
If this already exists but I am yet to find it, then I will bow down to my learned peers :smile:

DucatiMondo:

Also, sort of Admin section related and maybe possible already... perhaps I'm just lacking in my general ZC prowess. But is it not possible some way to change the status of multiple orders at once. Currently I seem to have to open each individual order to change it's status. When marking items as shipped for example. Maybe in a similar way to that which is used on the popular, yet ever more frustrating auction site that is so well known.
If this already exists but I am yet to find it, then I will bow down to my learned peers :smile:

Check the super orders 3 add on!

Thanks for the feedback folks.

Please keep the posts on topic. We are only talking about the Future Admin Dashboard at the moment.

A simplified version of Who's Online.

Like: number of visitors viewing products, have a filled shopping cart, visitors that are performing unknown and/or suspicious actions, total pages that are currently accessed, number of customers that are logged in, number of detected spiders. But no details like ip-address, host name, user name etc etc here.

And the ability to switch off (and order) those widgets, but I guess that's already covered by Kuroi.

Thanks Paul. Good idea.