Have you ever asked yourself what users actually do on your site?
What they add to the cart, when they do it, when they change the delivery method?
Maybe they start with credit card, then switch to PayPal, then end up choosing bank transfer.
Have you ever stopped to really think about that?
And how do you handle that in your logs?
If you even handle it at all, right?
Let’s say your business needs to track this stuff. Could be for a ton of reasons.
One: to find a bug in how the site behaves.
Two: to actually understand what users do and why.
Maybe you’ll see most people start with PayPal but end up paying with card. Maybe you wanna push card payments more. Or maybe you just wanna know what products people add to their basket more often.
Sure, for that last one, Reports and Dashboards can help.
But what if you wanted to see it per user, like... know exactly what John Doe did on your site.
That's when things get tricky.
Reports and Dashboards give you general data. Everything is anonymized. You can’t know who did what.
And logs? Well... you’re not supposed to store personal data there. In fact, Salesforce strongly advises against it. And they even have filters for that.
So here’s a real case from a project I’m working on.
It’s in the grocery business.
And yeah, customers there behave a bit different.
They can start their shopping today… and maybe complete the order tomorrow. Or even a week later.
That’s a problem.
Why?
Prices can change from one day to the next. Products can go out of stock.
Delivery time slots can disappear.
So a user might select one delivery day, then change it.
Pick card payment, then change to PayPal because they see delivery is free if they use it.
You get the idea. A basket isn’t static. It changes a lot.
So... what’s the solution if we can’t use logs and dashboards don’t give us per-user data?
You’re not gonna believe this, but...
You can use order notes.
Yep. As simple as that.
Every time something relevant happens to a basket, you add a note.
You build a story. A timeline of what happened with that order before it was finally submitted.
Like:
Day 1 – user picks in-store pickup.
Day 2 – changes to home delivery.
Day 3 – changes payment method.
Boom. All in the notes.
Now even someone working in Business Manager can look at those notes and get the full picture.
If something went wrong with a delivery slot, and it’s not recorded in the shipping data, the note can tell us what the user tried to do.
And maybe, just maybe, you avoid a complaint or a bad review.
So yeah. My recommendation?
Track whatever matters to you in the order notes.
There are a couple of limits though.
Each note can have max 4,000 characters. If you go beyond that, it’ll throw an exception and won’t save anything.
Also, you can’t have more than 1,000 notes per order (quota limit).
So just be a bit smart about what you track.
But other than that...
Feel free to go wild. Track whatever makes sense for your business.
