Introduction
We all know how frustrating it can be when our online store experiences bugs and errors. For Shopify Plus users, it’s even more frustrating when they believe these issues can’t be solved. But what if we told you that there is a solution? That’s where Noibu comes in. This case study aims to debunk this misconception by examining the relationship between Noibu and Shopify Plus, through Barstool Sports.
Shopify Plus is a popular eCommerce platform that provides businesses with a seamless way to sell their products online. However, like any platform, it is not immune to bugs or errors and can experience technical glitches that can negatively impact your business, if gone unchecked.
In general, eCommerce websites face a range of technical challenges, including server downtime, checkout process errors, and slow load times, among others. These technical issues are detrimental to any business’ online sales and customer satisfaction. As such, it’s important for eCommerce businesses to have tools in place, like Noibu, to uncover and resolve errors quickly.
In this case study, we will look at the experiences of Joe Bona, a Senior Software Engineer at Barstool sports – a company that uses Shopify Plus as its eCommerce platform and Noibu to detect and resolve errors successfully.
Benefits of Using Noibu
At Barstool Sports, releasing new features quickly is crucial to the business’ success. Noibu assists Joe in preserving the integrity of existing code and maintaining a smooth customer experience on their sites, by ensuring new releases do not cause disruptions.
Noibu enables Barstool to detect errors missed during testing, and allows the team to work efficiently by prioritizing any code issues before they negatively impact the business. The team trusts and relies on Noibu to uncover any problems in the code that arise after changes the team implements.
As a software engineer, it’s important to Joe that he is able to be more proactive than reactive. He explains how our platform helps him “catch regressions if they happen somewhere when shipping features out regularly.” He added that Noibu acts as a final check failsafe and helps him ensure that his eCommerce platform is running smoothly and efficiently at all times.
“As it relates to our KPIs and work, in traditional software development, we’re writing tests – so there are test suites, and test runners. With new features we launch, code that was shipped a year ago might now be affected, which Noibu brings to our attention. Shopify doesn’t have any native application monitoring solutions.”
In these first party error situations, being “able to throw [labels] onto errors and seeing whether or not they are solvable” (Noibu’s resolvability feature) has been really useful to Joe’s work to stay organized and laser-focused. The software engineer also explained the usefulness of Noibu’s ‘last seen’ data point to know whether a fixed issue has been resolved definitively for consumers, “whereas if you didn’t have that, you simply think you fixed an error, throw it away, and move on.”
He goes on to explain that Barstool has been able to use Noibu to uncover errors that “could otherwise go unnoticed for weeks or even live on the site forever,” and come to a speedy resolution to continue to drive their business forward.
“We’ve been using Noibu for two years, across five storefronts. It gives us a lot of visibility into what’s happening behind the scenes in areas that we would not catch. We’re able to fix issues quickly, with little downtime.”
Listen below to hear how Joe uses Noibu every week, for over 2 years now!
Third Party Applications
Barstool, like a majority of eCommerce brands, uses many 3rd party applications to automate processes, add additional functionality, and improve customer experience, amongst other things. These tools can be extremely beneficial, but that doesn’t mean they can never cause issues.
Joe is no stranger to encountering errors resulting from third-party integrations with his Shopify sites – such as Facebook, SMS platforms, or Apple Pay, for example. When this occurs, the senior software engineer uses data within Noibu to flag the issue, and share key information from Noibu’s developer reports to get to the granular root cause of the bug – or where it’s coming from.
“In the rare cases where we can’t solve issues and the problem is beyond our code and control, we can at least point our third parties in the right direction or have an informed way of asking support, what’s going on?”
Noibu’s data has also allowed Joe to hold third-party apps accountable for outages or other malfunctions.
Joe explains that “sometimes there’s just third party applications that have outages and we would have no other way to know that an app is out without Noibu. We’ve seen it at times, for example on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Outside of just staring at the console and visiting pages, we would never know that.”
Working with Shopify Plus Support
In the uncommon, yet significant, times where Joe comes across bugs specific to Shopify Plus, he leans on Noibu’s software to provide the necessary information to their Shopify support representative, guiding them to be aware of and address the issue, as well as point them in the right direction for error resolution.
In the real world example where checkout outages occurred for Barstool due to a Shopify platform error, Noibu enabled the team to catch the issue and act quickly to resolve it with Shopify’s team.
Joe also highlighted situations where Noibu flagged Shopify errors negatively affecting multiple of Barstool’s domains at the same time.
“We sometimes see a specific bug across our different stores, which happens occasionally when it’s Shopify-specific. We typically escalate these to their support team.”
Conclusion
In conclusion, using Noibu has allowed Barstool to quickly detect and resolve errors, even when using a robust eCommerce platform like Shopify Plus.
Noibu’s features and relevant data has been able to provide Joe with the information his team needs to prioritize and debug errors efficiently, within his fast paced work environment. This has allowed Barstool to maintain a high level of performance and keep their customers happy.
Joe’s experience with Noibu has shown that, with Shopify Plus users, there’s a misconception that errors detected through Noibu are all unsolvable platform issues. In reality, this isn’t the case.
Noibu has helped Barstool Sports resolve 25 issues across their 5 domains.
Noibu is a valuable tool for any business that uses Shopify Plus as its eCommerce platform. If you want to learn more about how Noibu can help your business experience eCommerce without frustration, shoot us an email anytime at info@noibu.com!
