> In some kind of loggable format that can be fed into a suitable data
> mining application (Either by slapping the data in a huge database
> directly or some easily parsable plain log file.)
No real point putting it in a database since, until you start mining it,
you're probably not going to want to retrieve the data and AFAIK it's
faster to append to a file than do a DB insert and it's also easier to
back up plain files than DBs.
<my 2 pence>
When I did City Office we had these features ...
o Could login/create user at any part of the process before actually
buying (easily done with sessions)
o Yahoo style, heirachical, shopping categories with items allowed to
be in more than category (we'd just done inodes in our OpSys lectures
<grin>)
o Temporary 'sales' values plus per-user 'loyalty' discounts on items
[0][1]
o Arbitary information could be applied to an item such as pictures,
links to manufacturers web sites etc etc
Simon
[0] It would be good if it was more fine grained so that discounts (per
user or whole system) could be applied to everything from an individual
item to a whole range of items and could be layered ontop of each other.
[1] This also translates quite easily into 'gift vouchers' a la Amazon
