Giant Tiger, a beloved Canadian discount retailer, has experienced impressive growth and success since its inception in 1961. With a focus on providing affordable products and a positive shopping experience, the company has expanded to over 250 locations across Canada. This case study delves into Giant Tiger’s recent eCommerce platform migration and how Noibu’s complimented their efforts to ensure Giant Tiger’s continued success, including its customer-centric philosophy on error detection and resolution.
We sat down with Anique Ahmed, Manager of Digital Platform Health & Data Management, who utilized Noibu in the successful implementation of a new eCommerce platform. As a key player at Giant Tiger, he is responsible for delivering a top-notch eCommerce experience while ensuring the health and reliability of all platforms – both customer facing and internal. Additionally, he oversees the company’s quality assurance and support functions.
eCommerce Platform Migration
Giant Tiger decided to undergo a full digital transformation, and with that came the decision to migrate to a different eCommerce platform – Shopify Plus, from Kibo. The project spanned a year, and has contributed to the rise of online sales since its launch.
Anique shared that the team followed a typical SDLC (software development life cycle) for their website migration. At a high level, this entailed;
Defining the scope and planning the objectives and goals of the project. Some challenges and considerations to this step include:
Aligning stakeholder expectations with technical feasibility
Ensuring all necessary features are identified and prioritized
Once the scope is defined, the project lead needs to create a detailed plan outlining the timeline, milestones, and required resources. This includes identifying the team members, tools, and technologies needed for the migration.
The next step is to design the architecture of the new platform, focusing on scalability, performance, and security. This involves creating wireframes, mockups, and technical specifications to guide the development team. Some considerations include;
Ensuring compatibility with existing systems and integrations
Balancing performance and scalability with ease of use and maintenance
Development and testing is the bulk of where Noibu can assist. During this phase, the development team builds the new platform according to the design specifications. Rigorous testing is conducted, including unit, integration, and system testing, to identify and fix any issues before the migration. It’s important to consider;
Managing development timelines and potential delays
Ensuring thorough testing to identify and resolve issues or bugs
Lastly, before deployment, comes data migration, which involves transferring all customer, product, and order data from one platform to the new. This process must be carefully planned and executed to avoid data loss or corruption and ensure data integrity during the migration.
Once the switch over is successfully complete, eCommerce brands enter the post-migration and maintenance/support phases. Here it’s imperative to conduct user acceptance testing (UAT) to validate the migrated website and address any remaining bugs, glitches, or performance issues.
Noibu’s Platform:
Noibu was integrated into Giant Tiger’s staging and QA site to fix any underlying errors during the development cycle. This workflow facilitated early detection and resolution of errors while streamlining the migration process, culminating in a healthier final deployment.
He went on to explain that Noibu was “a great help from a front end experience perspective”, as the team was able to see various errors that users would have experienced. This made sure that everything was proactively reported on and fixed, making testing as a whole easier and more effective.
“From a PAT and UAT perspective, Noibu was something that was critical to the success of fixing ongoing issues that would arise”
Throughout the entire project, Giant Tiger followed proper PAT (Performance Acceptance Testing) and UAT (User Acceptance Testing) testing procedures while utilizing Noibu’s script on their staging domain to test new features and identify errors before they affected real customers.
With a mandate to deliver successful platform health, Noibu was a tool that Anique and his team used frequently during the migration to mitigate risk of transactional or revenue impacting website issues. Noibu was critical in understanding the errors that would inevitably arise at each stage of the migration process, and helped smoothly triage those issues to Giant Tiger’s development team.
According to Anique, the team collaborated on implementing an efficient process to track defects observed in Noibu after each platform release. This process aims to monitor the overall health of each release or functionality with the adjoining incorporation of scorecards and metrics.
“We use insights in Noibu’s platform to better plan for future releases. So it’s not just obviously working on the issues on hand but planning for the future and ensuring that the types of issues that we’re seeing on Noibu are not reoccurring”
Noibu’s Support Team:
While the platform continues to be a valuable asset in Giant Tiger’s techstack since 2021, Noibu’s support team continues to be a valuable partner to their eCommerce team’s efforts.
Anique emphasized the value of one-on-one sessions with his customer success representative, as they played a crucial role in helping resolve various challenges during the migration process. This additional layer of support contributed to maintaining the overall health and success of the project.
Noibu’s customer success team worked to assist in flagging errors in the staging domain and working closely with Giant Tiger’s team to resolve them before the site went live. In addition, the team was also on standby support during the deployment, which resulted in a seamless launch without any hiccups!
Migration to Maintenance:
With a successful migration in the books, that doesn’t mean the team is in the clear. As any eCommerce professional knows, as one journey ends, another begins.
For Anique and his team, this means pivoting to the journey of continued stabilization, ensuring that there’s no other performance or user issues that occur. With a strong focus on business growth, Giant Tiger remains committed to leveraging Noibu for seamless releases in their roadmap moving forward. By partnering with Noibu, they prioritize customer satisfaction by striving towards error-free experiences.
After the migration, a good example of Noibu’s end-to-end assistance occurred when the team received an alert regarding an error that was obstructing iOS customers from completing their checkout process following a release.
Through email and Slack notifications, the team quickly identified the problem and utilized specific session recordings associated with the error to gain valuable insights. This facilitated a clear understanding of the issue at hand, enabling them to reproduce the error and swiftly resolve it.
Maintaining this approach of customer-centricity is of utmost importance to the team at Giant Tiger. Anique, who has encountered this challenge in previous roles, understands the significance of gaining a detailed view into the customer’s perspective.
He strongly emphasizes the value of this viewpoint within any organization, as it provides valuable insights into customer behaviors and enables continuous efforts to address and minimize issues. By adopting this customer-focused lens through Noibu, Giant Tiger strives to proactively improve their overall experience, thus increasing the business’ revenue potential.
With Noibu, Giant Tiger’s eCommerce team has resolved 38 errors from February to April of 2023, totalling in just over $1.4 million in annualized revenue loss.
