The Ecomm Analyst

Klar, Polar Analytics and ThoughtMetric get compared often because they overlap on the headline feature, multi-touch attribution for e-commerce, while being built on very different ideas. Klar is a European platform that ties attribution to profitability. Polar is a business intelligence platform with attribution inside it. ThoughtMetric is an attribution tool first. (Disclosure: ThoughtMetric sponsors this site.) Which one fits depends less on the attribution model than on what you want the tool to be. Side by side Klar Polar Analytics ThoughtMetric (sponsor) Pricing basis Net revenue over the last 12 months Not listed on the website Monthly pageviews Published…

Post-purchase upsells are one of the easiest AOV wins on Shopify, and one of the easiest to over-credit. The offer appears after the customer pays, a one-click accept adds an item, and the upsell app’s dashboard reports a tidy revenue figure. The question I care about is different: how much revenue does the funnel add that would not have happened anyway, and which ad channel is quietly collecting credit for it? How Shopify records an upsell Per Shopify’s developer docs, the post-purchase page sits after the order is confirmed and before the thank you page. Accepted offers modify the original…

Candle and home fragrance brands have an odd measurement calendar. A large share of the year’s revenue lands in November and December, much of it from gift buyers who may never order again, while the profitable customers are the ones who come back for a refill or a new seasonal scent in March. Discovery often happens on Pinterest and Instagram, where people save a photo of a styled shelf and buy weeks later. And with order values often in the $30 to $60 range, a tool priced for $200 baskets eats margin fast. So the useful questions are whether a…

Footwear has a measurement problem most categories do not: size. A first-time buyer is unsure of fit, so returns and exchanges run high on first orders, while a repeat buyer knows their size and comes back with little prompting. That splits a footwear brand into two businesses. Paid media mostly buys the first order, which is the riskiest one, and repeat orders carry the margin. An attribution tool that reports gross revenue on blended customers will flatter the channels that bring in the most returns. So for a shoe brand I care about three things before features: whether the tool…

Polar Analytics has real strengths for a high-ticket brand. Its pixel uses a Lifetime ID to stitch journeys across devices, which matters when someone researches a $2,000 bike on a phone and buys on a laptop a month later, and it offers ten attribution models, including a Shapley-based model it calls Full Impact. The issue for most high-AOV brands is volume, not capability. A store selling 40 orders a week has thin data for any sophisticated model, and Polar sells attribution inside a full business intelligence platform whose pricing is not listed on the website. If you are high-ticket but…

Polar Analytics handles TikTok and Snapchat reasonably well on paper. Its pricing page lists TikTok as a one-click connector, Snapchat appears among its connectors, and its incrementality product can run lift tests on TikTok campaigns with a dedicated data scientist. The reason brands look elsewhere is the shape of the purchase. Polar is a full business intelligence platform on a dedicated Snowflake database, its pricing is not listed on the website, and a brand that mainly wants an honest read on two video channels may not need the whole data stack. TikTok and Snapchat drive buyers who watch, never click,…

Northbeam has a firm opinion about Google. Its default Clicks-Only model, per its docs, excludes bottom-funnel touchpoints including branded search, direct, email and SMS from credit. For a Meta-heavy brand that is a healthy correction. For a brand that spends most of its budget on Search, Shopping and Performance Max, it can leave a large share of Google revenue sitting in a bucket that gets no credit, which makes the biggest channel the hardest one to manage. Add Starter at $1,500 a month, described as month-to-month for Shopify brands, and a Google-first brand has fair reason to compare. These five…

International brands that look past Northbeam usually do it for two reasons. The first is cost. Starter is listed at $1,500 a month on month-to-month terms for Shopify brands, while other platforms are pointed to annual tiers, and a brand running regional stores on mixed platforms can land there quickly. The second is the math. When a store sells in five currencies, buys media in three and settles in one, every tool has to pick an exchange rate, a time zone and a reporting currency, and those choices decide whether blended ROAS means anything. Before signing with any of them,…

For a lot of Shopify brands, email and SMS report a third or more of revenue. The trouble is that the number usually comes from Klaviyo, Attentive or Postscript grading their own work. They credit a sale to a message that was opened or clicked within an attribution window, which means a returning customer who was going to buy anyway can be counted as an email sale, and sometimes as a Meta sale too. Triple Whale reports email and SMS next to paid channels, and its paid plans are priced by annual GMV on 12-month terms. For an owned-channel-heavy brand,…

Triple Whale is one of the few attribution platforms with a post-purchase survey built in, and it uses the answers well. When its pixel has no click for an order and the buyer names a channel, the order is credited from the survey. When the answer matches what the pixel already saw, the order is deduplicated so nothing is counted twice. So the reason to look elsewhere is rarely the survey. It is the platform around it, since Triple Whale’s paid plans are priced by annual GMV and package on 12-month terms. If what you want is the “how did…