Squashing eCommerce Bugs With Noibu
I’ve been an Account Manager in the world of eCommerce for quite a while now, and there’s one issue that genuinely gets under the skin of my clients, developers, and me – bugs!
Bugs are a pain because they eat up so much developer time that could otherwise be spent on improving the functionality of an eCommerce store. They’re not just a problem for the client, who often ends up paying for all those developer hours, but are also a bother for us. We’d rather be focusing on more progressive tasks, like improving conversion rates, than spending time investigating why the checkout is throwing an error or why order confirmations are not being sent.
We’ve been hunting for a solution to this problem for far too long, until that one day we stumbled upon Noibu… So let me tell you how teaming up with Noibu has brought in a great collaboration for sorting out client issues that has completely changed the way we tackle error related challenges.
Online Retailers Lose Millions Every Year Because Of Bugs
Year in, year out, online retailers find themselves losing millions because of website errors and bugs. This is especially true during the end of the year holiday season – a period where ensuring a frictionless customer journey becomes more important than ever. In the US alone, this cost can skyrocket to $60 million of lost revenue during the festive times¹.
Diving into the data even more, a study by Applause unveiled that among a selection of 52 leading global retailers, customers stumbled upon over 3,000 bugs during a peak shopping window. What’s worse, over half of these errors popped up during the purchasing process!
But here’s a nugget for you: a big chunk of this lost revenue comes from just the few most severe errors, meaning that just one nasty bug can cause a massive drop in sales¹.
This aligns with our own findings from a case study where we saved a client £667,994 in annualised revenue by resolving 11 critical issues using Noibu.
User Patience Is Wearing Thin With Errors
With all the choices available online, customers expect a smooth shopping experience. If they run into even a small problem, they quickly get frustrated. With so many other options just a click away, most customers won’t put up with a bad user experience. 75% of them will leave an eCommerce website or app if they face issues like errors, glitches, or broken links. And it’s not just about that one sale – over half of these customers will start trusting a brand less if they come across problems on its website or app².
How Bugs and Errors Lead to Revenue Loss
Let me break down some of the most frequent offenders and the spanners they throw into the works that we’re seeing on a daily basis working with our clients.
- Missing Product Data: Whether it’s sizes, colours, images, or even product titles, any missing data can ripple into a series of issues affecting product pages, checkout processes, or even warehouse management systems.
- Payment Issues: Nothing deters a customer faster than payment bugs. Whether it’s the primary payment gateway or alternative methods like PayPal or Apple Pay, any malfunction can easily ruin the checkout experience.
- Promotions and Discounts Going Wrong: The anticipation of a sale or promotion can quickly turn to frustration if there’s an error during the launch. Perhaps the discount doesn’t activate, or a bundle offers malfunctions.
- Missing Redirects: During site migrations, missing redirects can wreak havoc on both organic search rankings and user experience. While primary pages might be accounted for, secondary pages are susceptible to being overlooked.
- Delayed or Non-Loading Images: While customers might overlook a fast-loading site, they are quick to notice slow ones. The issue often isn’t the images themselves, but how they’re displayed or fail to load, impacting the overall site experience.
How Our Partnership with Noibu Works in Practice for the Benefit of eCommerce Stores
Identifying The Issue
Every eCommerce platform, like the one you might be running or overseeing, is a complicated system. They’re often laced with third-party integrations, get revamped occasionally, launch new features and must accommodate a variety of tools and devices. It’s usually because of this complexity that errors and bugs tend to pop up.
When a client identifies a bug or error on their website, they bring it to our attention. Typically, the flagged issue will contain the details of the problem from minor website bugs to major payment gateway problems.
Time is super important here. The longer the error is impacting the frontend, the higher the chance it could be impacting potential revenue loss.
In the days gone by, while we would sometimes receive detailed information on the issue from the client such as OS version, device or the steps we can take to replicate the error, pinpointing the issue in the code would still have taken a long time. Depending on the complexity and the nature of it, the investigation could have taken hours and sometimes days.
This is where Noibu steps in, providing us with tools to offer a solution tailored to address the specific problems highlighted by the client.
Media Lounge Expertise With Noibu Tech In Action
On receiving a ticket, Noibu’s system prioritises it based on the severity of the issue and its potential financial repercussions. It can also spot recurring problems, ensuring we’re always a step ahead.
Noibu’s dashboard helps us cut through the clutter and noise. Instead of trailing through significant lines of possible infected code and data, this dashboard highlights what truly matters – the health of a site, issues that need immediate attention, and the tasks currently in play.
While some errors might escape the naked eye, Noibu tracks both JavaScript and HTTP errors, ensuring we’re always aware of potential dangers, especially those affecting the checkout and payment processes.
Back to the dashboard – our development team especially appreciates the Developer Tab that presents a breakdown of each bug, detailing everything from its origin to its specific impact across various browsers.
It also gives us a look under the hood at how the issue appears within the site’s JavaScript. Each Stackframe in the Stacktrace represents a JavaScript file where the error appears, and highlights the exact line of code that triggered the error.
Noibu’s Features That Make It Easier For Us
Noibu comes stacked with plenty of other features that really help us identify any issues on the client’s website.
Session overview – this lets us watch back how customers move around a website. We can see how they interact, spot any hiccups, and find errors that might stop a sale. We keep a log of every visit to your online shop, sorted by time and how much it might mess up the customer experience.
This log is a gem for matching up what customers say with what actually happened. If a customer says something stopped them from buying, we can dig into the details and check the logs to find out what went wrong.
Symptom Analysis – here, we look for patterns that show customers are getting frustrated – like lots of angry clicks, constant refreshing, or half-filled forms left hanging. We check how often these happen compared to the usual and see how they’re making things tougher for customers.
Issues Overview – at the heart of Noibu is tracking problems. When something’s off on your site, Noibu collects all the info, slaps on a clear title and an Error Signature, and puts it in our problem list. This gives us a bird’s eye view of what’s going wrong and the tools we need to figure out what’s most important, give it a closer look, and get it sorted.
Measuring Efficiency and Effectiveness
A good few years into this partnership The synergy between Media Lounge’s eCommerce expertise and Noibu’s technical acumen has been nothing short of a game-changer for the clients and dev team here at Media Lounge.
Quick and effective resolution results in financial gains for our clients. It’s hard to point at another area of our work where we’d see so much improvement when it comes to speed, cost savings and the percentage of positive outcomes.
