Undetected or unaddressed website errors can drastically undercut your revenue within a matter of days or even hours. Such errors interfere with the shopping experience, causing frustration and forcing customers to abandon their purchases. They also erode customer trust and confidence in the company. This ultimately results in significant revenue loss.
Hence, maintaining an error and bug-free website is a matter of survival for e-commerce companies.
In the absence of adequate visibility, a persistent bug can lurk undetected for months or years, thereby eating into your session lengths, customer experience, and revenue. Hence, error resolution is a critical aspect of the e-commerce workflow.
Let’s look at the top issues that lead to frustration and cause shoppers to bounce away without purchasing.
Broken Images
Broken image error messages ruin the user experience and prevent shoppers from making a purchase decision.
From the shopper’s perspective, broken images come across as untrustworthy and unprofessional, thus spiking up the store’s bounce rate.
Further, they lead to serious ranking drops in the SERP as they interfere with the site’s crawling and indexation, thereby hindering your organic visibility.
Here are the possible reasons for broken images:
Wrong format
For instance, an image was uploaded with a .png extension but is identified as a .jpg in the code.
Wrong path to file extension
If the code contains misprints or a wrong location path, the browser will not follow the path to load the image.
Modified file name
A small misprint in the name will cause errors.
The file was removed from the server
Site relocation often causes the removal or replacement of image files.
SSL certificate issue
Check if links to the image belong to the new SSL certificate.
Server not responding
This can prevent the image from loading on the website.
CMS renewal
This often modifies the path and changes the name of the image folder.
Broken images significantly slow down the page loading speed, causing a loss of traffic and revenue. Hence, it’s critical to address the broken image issue promptly.
Broken Links and 404 Errors
Nothing wrecks a seamless shopping experience like hitting a dead end. Broken links undo all the efforts put in by the sales and marketing teams to achieve a conversion.
Broken links show up as –
- 404 Page Not Found (page doesn’t exist on the server)
- 404 Bad Request (the server couldn’t understand the URL)
- Timeout (the HTTP request failed and timed out)
- Reset (the connection between the web page and its host has failed)
Though 404 errors don’t hurt SEO, they lead to shopper frustration and disappointment, disrupting UX and driving potential customers away. Hence, you’d want to fix broken links as soon as possible.
Here’s why broken links occur:
Typos
Spell errors are one of the most common causes of broken links. At times, one stray character is enough to break a link.
Deleted pages
If a page is removed from the index the links pointing to it are broken.
Change in the domain name
If a store is rebranded or merged, there’s a possibility that the developer may not have updated all the internal links to reflect the new domain name. This may cause the link to break and give error messages.
Tinkering with URLs
If webmasters change the URL without updating it, the link breaks.
A recent study by Ahrefs revealed that 66.5% of links to 2,062,173 sites in the last 9 years are broken, leading to link rot. Broken links are roadblocks to the conversion process. Hence, spotting and fixing them promptly is essential.
Fetch Errors
Fetch errors occur when the JavaScript code calls the fetch method to make an HTTP request to a remote URL and the method fails. Usually, developers dismiss these errors as unfixable.
However, these errors need detailed investigation.
Fetch requests are used for various purposes on e-commerce websites. For instance, they are used in analytics, customer loyalty programs, live chats, error reporting, reviews, social media integrations, and more.
The impact of JavaScript fetch errors depends on the purpose of fetch; however, since these errors are seen in code related to making network requests, they interfere with the network connection. This translates into poor website performance and user experience.
Fetch error messages occur because of –
User network issues
The user’s internet connection is the most common culprit.
Fetch unexpectedly canceled
The fetch call was initiated but the connection was unexpectedly closed before a response was received. This could happen because of the browser’s default timeout, an automatic page refresh/redirect, or a user navigating away from a page in a way that cancels the fetch result.
Fetch target issues
This is primarily because the server is unavailable, a DNS Lookup failure, or the server’s security policy isn’t allowing the server to accept the request.
Payment Gateway Errors
Keeping the payment technology up to date is central to maintaining customer satisfaction, revenue flow, and efficient e-commerce operations. Yet, payment gateway outages are pretty common in e-commerce, leading to disruptions.
The delays, errors, and processing failures caused by payment gateway bugs ruin the checkout experience. It is seen that whenever a checkout error or billing error occurred customers lost trust and abandoned their purchase.
These gateways often rely on complex software and hardware systems that encounter technical issues like bugs. Spotting such payment gateway bugs through session playback recordings is critical as it helps you understand the first-hand challenge faced by the shopper and its revenue impact.
Since payment gateway errors are third-party errors, they are beyond your control. Therefore, you need an e-commerce error detection platform that can spot such errors and point to the priority areas that need fixing before they ruin user experience and revenue.
Leveraging Noibu helps detect all site errors while fetching your team the actionable solutions they need to prioritize and solve them. With Noibu you can never be in the dark when it comes to third-party app-related issues.
Shopping Cart Issues
Bugs often cause error scenarios in the shopping cart, disrupting the checkout process. This friction causes shoppers to lose trust in the brand and abandon their purchase.
A report on Retail Dive shared that 58% of those people have abandoned purchases because of website bugs and poor UI.
More often than not, these are silent bugs or silent errors and do not notify the developers or the quality analyst. Such undetected e-commerce errors result in huge revenue losses, especially with loyal shoppers.
Hence, it’s important to automated error-monitoring system running that listens to the silence of having failed payments and alerts the team with error messages. That way you can spot these errors before they hurt your business, measure their impact on revenue, and resolve them.
Buttons not Working
Oftentimes shoppers face the issue when the buttons on an online store do not respond or show on the page. Such glitches especially hurt when the customer is trying to make a purchase. This is a lost sales opportunity, negatively affecting revenue.
Moreover, such flawed interactive features leave a poor impression on shoppers. Worse – it leads them to think the website is hacked.
Buttons on e-commerce websites help in easy navigation and enhance user experience. Hence, it’s important to spot flaws that get in the way of the smooth functioning of interactive features.
Missing Redirects
Missing redirects are a common e-commerce error, especially for stores that have undergone replatforming.
Redirects are critical for maintaining customer continuity. In the case of an e-commerce platform migration, redirects remove the possibility of past shoppers not finding the store after it has been moved to a new location.
Further, they offer browsers and search engines with the information on a URL and where to find the page. So, imagine what happens if your e-commerce site has missing redirects.
Missing redirects negatively impact customer experience, the store’s organic search presence, and conversions. To avoid such errors, an e-commerce team should work with an SEO agency to map out all web pages and devise an error resolution strategy.
Slow Loading Images
Slow website speed is the top reason why shoppers abandon their purchases.
Several factors impact the site speed. However, slow-loading images are by far the most common reason for a slow website. If the image file isn’t compressed, there’s a risk of slow image loading, thereby impacting the customer experience, conversion rates, customer retention, and SEO ranking.
E-commerce websites often carry high-resolution images of diverse products and product catalogs. Add to this clunky code and script errors, server issues, or caching/CDN hiccups and you have an e-commerce store with high abandonment rates.
As a part of the error resolution process, this issue should be addressed before a website launch or site migration. Make sure you compress the images, tidy up the code, and tune up your server to ensure the website is up and running.
Noibu: Your Proactive Partner in E-Commerce Error Resolution
We saw all the common errors encountered by e-commerce websites. For large e-commerce enterprises that receive millions of site visitors each month, staying on top of these errors can be a monumental task. Usually, these errors only catch attention when customers report them, which is mostly not more than 10% of the times.
Such random error reporting workflows do not promise 100% detection or resolution. In fact, 90% of website errors are never reported by customers.
Hence, you need a robust, proactive, and automated platform that
– monitors your e-commerce websites and flags errors in real-time
– removes the guesswork by offering detailed web session information for each error in a timely manner
– prioritizes errors that have the highest impact on conversions and the business top line
The Noibu platform does all of the above.
The e-commerce error resolution and health monitoring platform proactively detects all HTML and JavaScript errors on your site and flags them in real-time. It alerts the team of every bug causing friction in customer experiences and impacting cart abandonment.
Besides, it provides the technical details needed by the development team, helping them with efficient error resolution without having to spend hours replicating them. The platform equips the team with all information from the exact user session to the exact line of code, thus boosting the team’s efficiency in resolving errors.
Noibu monitors users as they navigate your store. Whenever they face a technical issue, it is flagged to your team along with the corresponding session details and technical information. This allows you to address the error right away, or prioritize based on the impact the error has on the top line and customer experience.
Similarly, Noibu ensures a flawless and uninterrupted checkout flow. It scrutinizes the website continually and identifies and alerts on issues that disrupt the checkout process.
Create an Error Resolution Strategy For Your Online Store and Stay Ahead of The Curve
The e-commerce industry is more competitive than it’s ever been. You will not want to lose customers and revenue over errors and bugs lurking around your website and ruining the customer experience.
Hence, the transactional journey you offer to shoppers should be seamless and meet the high expectations of modern customers. Planning and executing a proactive error resolution strategy can be tricky. But with Noibu as your e-commerce monitoring co-pilot, you can minimize the impact of these errors and recover potentially lost revenue.
Book a demo with us to see Noibu in action or get a free checkout audit to detect and resolve JS, HTTP, GQL, and image errors and uncover what’s really happening under the hood of your site.
