Differences of ecommerce and enhanced ecommerce of Google Analytics

Question

I was just recently learn about Google Analytics, ecommerce, and enhanced commerce, to be implemented on a website. Actually, someone else already implemented the Google Analytics and ecommerce, and maybe also the enhanced ecommerce, so right now I tried to understand his code and implement the enhanced commerce if it hasn't been implemented.

Is that ecommerce object is starting with "ecommerce:" ? Like ga('ecommerce:'...) ? I noticed that the enhanced ecommerce has prefix of "ec:". Is "ecommerce:" and "ec:" interchangeable?

Btw, I found the documentation at Google, which stated that

The Enhanced Ecommerce plug-in should not be used alongside the Ecommerce (ecommerce.js) plug-in for the same property.

This raised my concern, but I don't know what to do with this. Does this mean I have to remove all the previous ecommerce implementation? I cannot set up a new track object and track ID just for the enhanced ecommerce. Thanks.

Answer 1

The core difference between Enhanced ecommerce and Standard ecommerce is that the latter primarily tracks transactions on the Order confirmation/Thank-You page only, whereas the former allows you to track transaction processes from adding to the cart, to payment method, to shipment, to review, and finally to checkout (and maybe some other steps in between as well). EE allows you to also track additional things like impressions and promotions, and allows you to build funnels through the checkout process. Through the various funnel reports (Goal Flows, Funnel visualisation), you can also determine abandonment rates. There are also a greater diversity of reports available through an EE implementation, including Product Performance, Sale Performance, and Product Lists Performance that provide further insight in to the ecommerce experience.

In terms of the technical implementation, the "ecommerce" and "ec" methods are not interchangeable (I do not believe) - you can't import the "ec" module, and use ecommerce:{command}, and vice versa, you can't import the "ecommerce" module, and use ec:{command}. I believe you would need to update the code from ecommerce to ec.