For Internet-based retailers, it is no longer enough just to flash hockey-stick sales curves at investors and impress them with stratospheric sales figures each quarter. What they require are appropriate benchmarks, which managers and investors alike can use to see how well an online merchant is really doing. Decomposing sales and buyer data to gain a better understanding of the way visitors behave is even more important on the Internet than in the bricks-and-mortar world. According to Forrester Research, a consulting firm in Boston, more than 70% of Internet retailers in 1999 had a conversion rate of less than 2%, which is to say that of every 100 visits to a retail website, only two resulted in purchases. Industry experts suggest that market leaders such as Amazon.com have conversion rates no higher than 15% to 20%. Even this data is fuzzy at best, however.…