Full Answer
WooCommerce ETL integrations poll the REST API for database records—six entity types: orders, products, customers, coupons, refunds, and shipping. Useful for sales reporting, not behavioral analysis. These tools cannot capture behavioral events because those events exist only in browser sessions, not in the WooCommerce database.
The gap matters for predictive analytics. Customer lifetime value modeling, churn detection, and purchase propensity require the full funnel. With average ecommerce conversion rates of 1-3%, ETL-only BigQuery integrations contain data on buyers only. The 97-99% of visitors who did not convert—their browsing patterns, cart abandonment, and session behavior—are invisible.
Event streaming delivers behavioral data as it happens. The result: BigQuery tables with the full funnel, not just confirmed orders.