Tracking customers

[nalenb]

I'm wondering what everyone uses to track customers. Here I'm thinking about tracking in terms of future upgrades, registration numbers, refunds, tax purposes, etc. and not emailing them for other purposes.

Do you use something off the shelf? Something home grown? Nothing at all?

Thanks
Bill

[princec]

Home grown database in MySQL. Works a treat.

Cas :)

[arcadetown]

Most payment processors provide reports that can be run to pulls sales data. Plus most allow you to pass custom data to the order process to be stored in their database so can do sales tracking. For example, we coded something to grab the referring site and stash in cookie and if customer buys we learn what site referred the sale.

[stan]

Home grown in php/MySQL. Took me three months... with almost no previous experience.
(I learned SQL at school 9 years ago, but hadn't used it since then. But that's not the technical side that took me the most time... It's deciding "simple" stuff like how to identify customers, what to track and store, how to handle downloads, etc.)

[nalenb]

So are you using a call back from the processor to add them to the database?