The shopkeeper at the local gift shop down the street hears a bell when the door opens, sees her customer wander the store, sees what that customer looks at, how long they stayed, and what they bought.
Unlike that real-life store down the street, your website or CafePress Premium shop, if not equipped with the right tools, will render you a blindfolded shopkeeper. Wondering who's coming in your store and when.
With Statcounter.com you're able to see, for each visitor to your site, exactly who's looking at which items, what city, state and country the person is from, how they found your site through which search engine, what page your site showed up in that search, what type of computer and operating system they are using, and that they visited for 5 seconds on their first visit, 8 minutes on their second visit, then bought the item they were looking for on their 3rd visit which lasted 15 minutes at noon on Thursday. You can even look at graphs and pie charts for a nice visual presentation of your stats (I love that part!).
If you have a CafePress Premium shop, you can sign up for Statcounter, get some HTML, copy it and paste it into the header or footer of your shop and it will track your visitors through to the shopping cart. Just make sure you place the code in the header or footer section of the "custom HTML" section of your shop so that it tracks every page in your shop.
For all of my web sites I use StatCounter.com. The thing that first drew me to Statcounter.com is that they offer a free service with the option to have an invisible counter. The catch? Your log size is limited to detailed stats on the past 100 visits. But the free service will still save all of the stats on your basic visits per day, new visitors and returning visitors. I just recently upgraded to the paid version to increase my log size and it's been well worth it.
What type of counter or stats service do you use? How are you using your stats to grow your shop?
