predicting site traffic & sales

[victoria]

Hello,

I was wondering if you knew where I could find information about forecasting sales on e-commerce sites. Specifically I’d like to know if there’s any sort of “recipe” people use in estimating the % of hits to a site that translate into sales, and the number of hits a site listed in international search engines might be expected to get per day, month, etc.

[larush]

There are some very good business intelligence and site analytics tools out there that can help predict traffic patterns and trends.

We've got a nice list of tools here: http://products.ecommerce-guide.com/analysis/wta/recent1.html.

Has anyone had any good/bad experiences with certain BI tools? Are there any you would recommend?