E-commerce platform provider Magento Commerce today announced it has bought e-commerce analytics platform RJMetrics. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition, which is Magento’s first as an independent company, aims to give retailers more tools that they can use to target promotions, improve their merchandising and bolster their inventory management.

Magento, No. 14 in the Internet Retailer Vendors to the Top 1000, plans to rebrand RJMetrics as Magento Analytics. In the next few months the e-commerce platform provider plans to fold some basic reporting metrics into Magento’s core platform that let merchants examine their customers’ histories, analyze their churn rate and calculate a simple customer lifetime value metric into its platform. Retailers can then add functionality and insights via a software-as-a-service model, which means that the vendor hosts the technology and clients access it via a web browser, paying monthly subscription fees instead of large, lump-sum licensing fees.

“RJMetrics enables us to accelerate our road map for adding more advanced reporting and analytics capabilities,” Mark Lavelle, Magento’s CEO, tells Internet Retailer. “This acquisition lets us offer another service to our partners that can help our clients get the most out of our platform.”

Lavelle believes Magento Analytics will be a “disruptive” technology because the majority of Magento clients are using few if any analytics technology other than Google Analytics, which he says doesn’t offer much in-depth information.

“Google Analytics lets retailers look at metrics like page views and conversion rates,” he says, but that’s only one perspective and it doesn’t let the retailer look at the people buying those products. Magento Analytics can connect to retailers’ customer relationship management software to help them understand their customers’ lifetime value, repurchase rates, churn rate and conduct cohort analysis, he says.

More advanced capabilities include marketing tools that can help retailers continuously tune and optimize campaigns and allocate marketing spend; merchandising and shopping insights that let a retailer dig into the performance of an individual item; page, placement, promotion and channel performance; and multibrand and cross-border analytics.

Acquiring RJMetrics is the first of many moves Magento, which became an independent company in November, aims to make to bolster the technology it offers retailers, Lavelle says.

“The blending of our platforms will open up a world of possibilities for our customers to define the future of commerce analytics,” says Robert Moore, RJMetrics’ CEO.

294 retailers in the Top 1000 use Magento’s e-commerce platform and two use RJMetrics, according to Internet Retailer’s Top500Guide.com. Among the retailers that are clients of both Magento and RJMetrics are Signature Hardware (No. 222), Bucketfeet and Draper James.