Webservices are a whole lot of fun. They let you focus on implementing a rich feature set in your application, and then extend it using a separate set of rich functionality that was developed and perfected elsewhere. But, life isn’t easy when you have to work with a secure system over the wire; you have to worry about authentication, session management, request/response size limitations, etc.

This is where Celigo’s ServiceManager comes in. The ServiceManager or SM (as we often refer to it), is an abstraction over the ground work that needs to be implemented when dealing with the SuiteTalk API.

Here’s a look at some of the features offered:

One of the chores you almost always have to deal with is login and relogin in the face of session timeouts. The SM handles this entirely transparently to the developer. In fact, other than having to setup the login credentials once, you as the developer can remain oblivious of the entire login/re-login process. The Service Manager will completely automate this. The SM actually goes one step further: it handles errors such as network failures, NetSuite session expirations, and automatic login retries transparently. All these features are fully configurable.

Batching & Record Limiting

For obvious reasons, SuiteTalk imposes several limitations on the size of the requests it processes. So what happens if you have thousands of records you wish to update? Well, all you have to do is drop them on to the ServiceManager the same way you would update (say) five records. The SM lets you pre-configure a request size threshold, and every mass add, update, or delete would automatically be chunked up into smaller requests and sent synchronously to NetSuite.

Other Features

The ServiceManager is also 100% thread safe. So you can safely share it among multiple threads, which is great if you want to perform any web services operations in a background thread.

In addition to the above, our SM library also includes a robust and full featured solution for connection pooling and queuing through the SessionPool interface. We will cover this topic in more detail in a future post.

Availability

Celigo has made the SM available as a free download. It’s available for Java and .NET. If you take a look at the CRM sample and the enhanced version of the same app using SM, you will get a pretty good idea as to how this abstraction works.

There’s a whole lot more we’d like to share about the ServiceManager. In addition to the details listed in our code snippet pages, we will continue to post more tidbits here on our blog. The SM is something we use across all our SuiteTalk projects, and therefore, have spirited arguments on how to continue to improve it on a daily basis. So we encourage you to give it a go, and don’t forget to get back to us on what features you like to see.

If you're running your web store on NetSuite, you may have heard about the challenges in implementing Google Analytics. In this posting, we will attempt to walk you through the details of setting up Google Analytics.

Once completed, you should be able to track web site activity across product catalog pages, shopping cart and checkout pages, and order submission and confirmation pages. Additionally, you can see a listing of all orders placed through your site including the ability to see the order number, order total, shipping total, and tax total.

We used the steps defined in this article as a basis to get started on this project.

Google Analytics Setup

1) Registration/Login

If you don't have an account already, first sign up for a free Google Analytics account here. Login to the account.

2) Create Website Profile

Under Web Site Profiles, click on Add Web Site Profile. Enter the name of the domain and click Finish. A block of code will be displayed as the example shown below. Please note the account number that is displayed in the form of UA-XXXXXX-X as shown below. You will need to plug in this number in the GANALYTICS tag defined in Step 1 of the NetSuite Setup section.

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x");
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

3) Setup & Create Goals

Under Analytics Settings > Website Profiles, click the edit button in the Settings column next to the just created domain. First ensure that the E-Commerce Website checkbox in the Main Website Profile Information section is checked. If not, click Edit for the section and make this change.

You can create multiple goals. We created the following goal to track the checkout process:

Click edit next to G1. Enter the following for Goal URL where ###### is your NetSuite account number.

   https://checkout.netsuite.com/s.nl?c=######&sc=4&category=thanks

For example: https://checkout.netsuite.com/s.nl?c=TSTDRV231585&sc=4&category=thanks (NetSuite Account =TSTDRV231585)

Name the goal page with whatever name you like (we called it Checkout) and set it to be active.

Next, setup the goal funnel. This is an optional step that allows you to specify a series of pages leading up to the Goal URL. In this example, we define the checkout steps that lead up to an order submission funnel. The exact pages that the funnel is comprised of is completely up to you. Here's an example of what we did (please note that these URLs may change slightly on your account):

   Step 1 - Shopping Cart:
   http://www.yourdomainhere.com/s.nl?sc=3 
   Step 2 - New User/Login:
   https://checkout.netsuite.com/s.nl?c=######&sc=4 
   Step 3 - Address:
   https://checkout.netsuite.com/s.nl/c.######/sc.4/category.billing/.f 
   Step 4 - Shipping:
   https://checkout.netsuite.com/s.nl?c=######&sc=4&category=shipping 
   Step 5 - Payment:
   https://checkout.netsuite.com/s.nl 
   Step 6 - Review and Submit:
   https://checkout.netsuite.com/s.nl?c=######&sc=4 
   Step 7 - Order Submission:
   https://checkout.netsuite.com/s.nl?c==######&sc=4 
   Step 8 - Thank You:
   https://checkout.netsuite.com/s.nl?c==######&sc=4&category=thanks

NetSuite Setup

1) Create Tag

Create a custom tag in NetSuite to represent the Google code by going to Setup > Web Site > Web Site Tags. We called ours GANALYTICS. The default value will be blank--such as <!-- Google Tracking Code -->.

Use the tag substitution feature in NetSuite to use the following code for every tab that needs to be tracked. You will need to replace the value of XXX with the value provided by Google for your website profile as described in the Google Analytics setup above.

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x");
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

2) Place the GANALYTICS Tag

Add the created <GANALYTICS> tag in the <Head> section of your HTML

3) Call Google JavaScript Method

Create a new tag named <GACHECKOUT> that has a default value of <!-- Ecommerce Tracking Code -->. In the Checkout tab, replace it with the following code (note that this tag needs to be placed before the </body> HTML tag):

<script>

pageTracker._addTrans(

    "<%=getCurrentAttribute('confirmation','ordernumber')%>",                         

    "<%=getCurrentAttribute('confirmation','partner')%>",                             

    "<%=getCurrentAttribute('confirmation','total')%>",                                      

    "<%=getCurrentAttribute('confirmation','tax')%>",                                 

    "<%=getCurrentAttribute('confirmation','shipping')%>",                                 

    "Portland",                                                                           

    "OR",                                                                                  

    "USA"                                                                                  

  );

pageTracker._addItem(

    "<%=getCurrentAttribute('confirmation','ordernumber')%>",                         

    "nosku",                                                                                

    "<%=getCurrentAttribute('confirmation','ordernumber')%>",                                     

    "Office",                                                                                         

    "<%=getCurrentAttribute('confirmation','total')%>",                                      

    "1"    

);

  pageTracker._trackTrans();

</script>

Note:  If there is no checkout tab on your account, you can also place the above script in the order Tracking script HTML at Setup > Websites > Setup Websites > Shopping Tab > Order Tracking Script HTML.

Google Analytic Reports Setup

Google Analytics provides many different forms of reports that you can use. A detailed review of the different types of reports are beyond the scope of this post. We would, however, like to point you to some of the reports that we setup to monitor the above goals.

1) Transactions 

This report allows you to view a listing of all orders placed through your site including the order number, order total, shipping total, and tax total.

2) Content Performance

This report allows you to view the performance of your pages--metrics such as page views, unique page views, time spent on each page, etc--using the actual page titles. 

3) Visits to Purchase

4) Top Landing Pages

Conclusion

The goal of this post was to provide you with details on how we have setup Google Analytics for a NetSuite web store. As mentioned before, the setup for each NetSuite account may differ given that each account is unique.

Since Celigo is a NetSuite Solution Provider, this work represents a typical project in our portfolio of services. We decided to share our knowledge on this topic so that others can benefit from our experiences given that this is a hot topic within the NetSuite community.

If you have any comments/feedback or have improvements to the above directions, we would love to hear from you so that the entire community can benefit as well. 

-- Jan 

Tcpmon is a great way to view http traffic if you know the ports your traffic is being routed through.  Launching the application couldn't be easier.  Simply specify a 'Listen Port #', 'Target Port #', 'Target Hostname', and click on Add.  Point the url of your web services client to the localhost port you have just setup and watch the SOAP fly on by.

Stunnel provides the ability to encrypt and decrypt data being sent to a server.  Working with NetSuite, it is a required component, unless you have the magical ability to decifer data sent across the https connection NetSuite requries.  Launching the application entails configuring the config file titled stunnel.conf and double clicking an executable startup script.

What's in it for you? In short, we invite you to benefit from our experiences. Our team has configured and implemented NetSuite for more than a hundred customers.

From a technical perspective, Celigo is a leader in automation and integration. We were part of the original Web services team at NetSuite that launched SuiteTalk, so we think we know a thing or two about this stuff...

For the curious--we use MoveableType (also a NetSuite customer) as our blogging platform.

--Jan