Dive Brief:

• Magento Commerce has acquired RJMetrics, whose cloud-based analytics offering will become part of the Magento Core platform, providing merchants with expanded insights into customers, merchandising, channels and other information. Financial terms were not disclosed.

• The RJMetrics solution, which will be renamed Magento Analytics, offers data on customer lifetime value, repurchase rates, inactive customers, churn and cohort analysis, enabling retailers to optimize digital shopping experiences and develop more targeted promotional efforts. Another chief benefit: Magento Analytics doesn't require specialist IT support to configure and run.

• Magento noted that a recent Forrester Research report showed that many companies only use one-third of the data that they collect, and that only 29% of them said they were good at translating the result of data and analytics into measurable business outcomes.

Dive Insight:

The retail industry is entering a new age in which competitiveness is increasingly dependent on advanced technology—not just how quickly you deploy it, but how many different ways you can leverage it and integrate it across your enterprise.

As retailers pursue the ideal of omnichannel commerce, they also must prepare for the tsunami of customer data that will come with it. They can have platforms that adequately support essential e-commerce functions, but to really to take the next step toward refining the shopping experience and maintaining strong, long-lasting customer relationships, they need a powerful analytics engine that can allow them to sift, study and repurpose all of the data they are collecting.

The Forrester figures mentioned above are alarming, because if retailers aren't studying much of the data they collect or using it in many ways, how much do they really know about their customers? And how can they keep them coming back?

Magento's platform has been able to do some of this already through analytics-focused partnerships, but offering native analytics capabilities as part of Magento Core should only help Magento to more easily prove its value to retailers.