Error resolution is an important part of any eCommerce company. Errors, when left unchecked, can be quite costly for online retailers, so it’s critical for teams to work together to ensure any newly detected site bugs are caught and resolved as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, much of that resolution burden falls onto developers’ shoulders, and as many developers know, today’s process for website error resolution can be time-consuming, tedious, and frustrating. In fact, in a survey conducted into the attitudes developers have towards debugging, more than 40% of respondents said that fixing errors is their biggest pain point at work.

Developers are embittered, but it’s detrimental for errors to stay live on a website. So with that in mind, let’s quickly explore why developers need to recreate in order to resolve, and then see if we can change the narrative that the only way to debug and find the root cause of an error is to spend hours on replication workflows.

Why developers need to reproduce errors

In order to understand why an error happened and how to fix it, developers must first reproduce an error in their development environment. Reproduction workflows allow developers to gather key pieces of information, such as affected browsers, operating systems, integration API calls, console logs, etc. This can be very time consuming: it requires copious amounts of exploratory trial and error, along with multiple rounds of tests for each step.

With this process in place, just over a quarter of surveyed developers are spending more than half of their sprint time on debugging efforts. With developers being the backbone of a company, that time drain is just not acceptable anymore – not to business leaders, and certainly not to developers.

“More than half of developers (55%) said that if they didn’t have to spend so much time fixing bugs, they would have the time to build new features and functionality.”

(Businesswire)

Why not all errors need to be debugged

In addition to being inefficient and frustrating for developers, misdiagnosed bugs also lead to wasted development resources.

Without access to the proper data before kicking off the debugging workflow, developers won’t have a full understanding of the cause, or severity, of an error. Without this data, developers won’t know if the error they’ve been tasked to address will actually bring about a significantly positive impact.

Thus they face the possibility of putting aside a new website feature in favor of fixing a bug that may not affect conversion. They also risk spending hours attempting to recreate the error, only to discover later, after the fix has been implemented, that the error was unlikely to harm the business’ revenue potential.

How to make debugging eCommerce websites more efficient

Is there a better way to debug eCommerce errors than through replication workflows? Not without access to the right data, at the right time.

The only way to reduce the need for tedious error replications is for developers to have access to all the technical and situational information needed to understand the root cause of an error, and to have this available with each support ticket and error resolution request that comes in.

Luckily, there is a platform that developers can use to gather all that data and more…

How this eCommerce tool saves your development teams’ hours

Noibu’s error monitoring platform is built to detect all customer-impacting site issues at the console and handler level, while also collecting all the information surrounding the error.

The software picks up on all relevant technical and situational data, including last-step-taken, error url(s), and browsers and devices most affected. While these data points are helpful in pointing developers in the right direction as to how to begin solving an error, they are not enough to eliminate the need for replication on their own.

Where repetitive replication processes can be cut down on, though, is when developers also have access to the stack trace and the specific line of code that produced the bug.

Both of these key assets are also provided for developers in the Noibu platform, within the dedicated Developer tab. Users can also view real-time session recordings of errors to get a better idea of the contextual impact the issue is having on customers.

With access to this level of data, Noibu customers have seen their average time to resolution decrease by 70%.

Rather than approximately 17.5 hours of every sprint being dedicated to error resolution per developer, the average Noibu-using developer only spends around 4.5 hrs on error resolution. This gives them a lot of time back in their day to focus on what they actually love doing: developing new code.

How to Get This for Your Team

eCommerce companies can personally request a Proof of Concept (POC) from Noibu, here.

For more information about the POC, navigate to The Noibu Trial: Why We Do a Proof of Concept.

Once the tag is deployed on your website, the platform immediately starts gathering data to bring into the console to help your teams identify new and existing bugs, prioritize them based on business impact, and debug them without losing hours to replication workflows.

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Error resolution is an important part of running any eCommerce company, and it’s important for teams to work together to ensure any new site bugs are resolved as quickly as possible. However, without access to the right data at the right time, developers get stuck in time-consuming, tedious, and frustrating replication workflows. Noibu helps to alleviate the need for error reproductions, allowing the development team to get back to their regular sprint projects.

Interested in exploring how Noibu can help your team? Send us a message at info@noibu.com!

As eCommerce continues to grow at a rapid pace, online retailers need to stay ahead of the curve to remain competitive. One way to do this is by utilising growth hacks, which are tactics and strategies used to quickly and efficiently grow a business.

In this blog post, we’ll be discussing the top 4 eCommerce growth hacks for online retailers in 2023.

1. Gamify the product selection experience

Ever lost an hour or two to Buzzfeed quizzes?

There is something compelling about discovering a bit more about ourselves, and personality quizzes are certainly a fun way to pass the time.

At the same time that we’re all on our own journey for self-discovery (as gimmicky or as seriously as you want to take it), the world of online marketing and sales is in the middle of a massive push towards online personalization.

This presents a fantastic opportunity for eCommerce professionals to marry these trends together and create a unique growth channel, one that doesn’t require a ton of API work or technical involvement.

Rather than leaving your potential customers to browse aimlessly through your products, and have them ponder whether or not a particular object is right for them, we suggest creating a short picklist quiz that leads potential customers to a curated list of items that would best suit their responses.

These quizzes don’t have to be in-depth – it could be as simple as a couple questions asking, “What word would you use to describe your personal fashion?” or, “What colour palette most closely matches what you typically wear?” On the flip side, it can involve more in-depth and personal (and therefore, engaging) questions such as, “How would your friends describe you?” or, “When you travel, do you look for history, food, culture, or relaxation?”

Ultimately, the goal is  for the customer to get excited about seeing which of your products best suit them.

Here’s a great example of this experiment in practice on the AWE Inspired website.

2. Highlight real customers

In a world where consumers are getting better at identifying marketing tactics, real-user reviews and social proof are becoming an increasingly important part of the online buying journey.

When customers can’t try something on, can’t hold or touch the object, can’t experience the product for themselves before they buy, they look to other customers to confirm satisfaction and quality.

Unfortunately, many online retailers know it’s not always the easiest task to get good reviews. It’s even harder to get good reviews that include product pictures.

An innovative growth hack to not only generate more reviews, but also increase page conversion, is to set up a Review Campaign for new eCommerce product launches.

When there’s a new product coming out on your site, consider sending a “Sneak Peak” offer to some of your top clients. This can include giving coupon codes to a set number of customers who order, if they write a review with a picture of the newly launched object.

This not only provides your most loyal customers with an additional perk and an incentive to keep shopping with you, but it also provides a reliable channel to get real-user reviews for other customers to reference when considering a purchase. It allows other customers to see what the product looks like in real life or in practice.

This initiative shouldn’t stop there, though. We also suggest running a test for on-page review placement.

Where most eCommerce sites display user reviews at the very bottom of each product page, consider taking the reviews and clearly displaying them close to the related product’s main specs. If your product has a colour-picker, a size-selector, or details about dimensions, consider prominently displaying a drop-down for your user reviews near those elements.

3. Loyalty and Points Programs

In a similar vein as perks and incentives, setting up a loyalty or rewards program for your eCommerce store is a sure-fire way to lock in repeat business, and if done correctly, can be a great avenue for referrals!

By allowing customers to accumulate points over time with purchases, they are incentivized to continuously return to buy more, which creates a positive growth loop.

For a great example of a successful points program, eCommerce professionals can look to the PC Optimum program available at the popular Canadian drug store, Shoppers Drug Mart.

For retailers that want to go the extra mile to accelerate the growth loop and widen their audience, eCommerce companies can launch a secondary loyalty campaign based off of referrals.

For this experiment, we suggest offering current loyalty members a boost in points every time another customer signs up to the loyalty program using their referral code. You can also sweeten the deal by giving all new loyalty program members that sign up via a referral an initial boost in points, too!

4. Exit-Intent Pop-Ups

Exit-intent pop-ups can be a critical asset for your website to have as a growth lever. These pop-ups can be incredibly effective at grabbing the attention of visitors on your site, and they provide a last minute avenue to engage with prospective customers, collect their email, or entice them back into the buying journey with a compelling offer, before they leave your website.

Why is it so crucial to engage with potential customers that are about to leave? As it currently stands, anywhere from 70-96% of visitors abandoning a site will never return. Being able to bring them back from the ledge with a coupon code, or even grabbing their email to send them collateral later on, can prove to be a massive win. In fact, according to OptinMonster, exit-intent pop-ups convert an additional 3% of website visitors.

Here are two examples of well performing exit-intent pop-ups:

Lush’s website serves up an impossible-to-miss pop-up when customers are leaving the site.

Here we see JCrew’s website serving up a smaller pop-up, but one that entices the customer to make a purchase with the offer of 15% off.

Want to put this in practice? Check out HubSpot’s piece on 29 Exit Intent Popup Examples and What Makes them Effective.

Conclusion

Let’s recap how eCommerce professionals can successfully drive sustainable growth in their business with an increase in sales, brand awareness, and loyalty;

1. Utilising personalization through gamification

2. Review campaigns for better social proof and user-confidence

3. Loyalty programs for better customer LTV and expanding audience reach

4. Exit-intent pop-ups as a last-ditch effort to convert potential customers

These are some of the most impactful eCommerce growth hacks that can help online retailers stay ahead of the competition in 2023.

As an eCommerce business, you know that the success of your company depends on your ability to convert marketing dollars spent into sales. You also know that Cost per Acquisition and Cost per Click have been skyrocketing due to increased competition in the industry. Because of these increases in costs, it’s even more important to ensure that the customers that have clicked through your marketing campaigns are driven to convert on your site at a high rate.

Fortunately, there are a few strategies that eCommerce marketers can use to increase the conversion rate of marketing campaigns.

1. Focus on Customer Segmentation

Focusing on audience segmentation is one of the most effective ways to improve your eCommerce marketing campaign conversion rate. The old strategy of “Spray and Pray” just isn’t sustainable anymore with the acquisition costs marketers are experiencing today. By not segmenting your audience, you risk;

1. Diluting your message too much to properly engage with any personas, and

2. Engaging with the wrong audience that will click through your ads, but not convert into a customer (thus driving up ad spend without contributing to marketing-influenced revenue)

Segmenting your audience allows you to create targeted campaigns that are tailored to the needs and interests of your specific customer groups, and makes sure that each dollar is spent on the right persona.

Having clearly defined segments, and building campaigns that specifically speak to each segment’s problems, frustrations, needs, and goals makes it easier to capture attention and encourage action.

Our suggestions for segmentation tools:
– Clearbit
– Heap
– Insightly
– Kissmetrics
– Segment
– Userpilot

2. Invest in Quality Content

Quality content is essential when it comes to eCommerce marketing campaigns; it helps build trust with your customers and encourages them to take action. Investing in high-quality content that resonates with your target audience is key to increasing your conversion rate. In fact, Home Depot saw a 23% increase in online sales after their digital team started investing in quality content.

It’s important to note here that while AI content is making massive strides in the world of marketing, humans still know humans best. So while it’s helpful to be able to publish a ton of content in a short period of time, it’s even better to put out truly high-quality and highly-targeted pieces of content that your users actually want to consume and learn from, and come back for more.

AI content will get to the point where it doesn’t need continuous human oversight, but until that happens, make sure to give each new content piece the care it deserves. When writing and editing content, make sure that it addresses what your users are looking for as well as what impacts Google ranking.

eCommerce Sites that create great content:
– BarkBox
– Charlotte Stone
– Lunya
– Nasty Gal
– Studio McGee
– Threadless

3. Utilize Automation Tools

If you’re in marketing and not using at least some sort of automation tooling, it’s time to get up to speed! Automation tools are becoming increasingly popular among eCommerce marketers to increase the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

The space eCommerce marketers work in is incredibly fast-paced, and tools that automate tasks can help teams save time and simplify workflows. For instance, they allow marketers to automate the creation of email campaigns, social media posts, and website content. Automation tools also enable marketers to track customer behaviour and create personalized experiences for customers. With automation, eCommerce marketers can be more efficient and save money by increasing their campaign effectiveness.

Our favourite automation tools:
– Active Campaign
– Buffer
– Hubspot
– Klaviyo
– Marketo
– Omnisend

4. Leverage Social Media Platforms

Social media is an incredibly powerful tool for eCommerce businesses. Utilizing social media platforms, such as TikTok, can help you reach a larger audience and generate more sales. For instance, you can use social media platforms to showcase your products and services, engage with customers, and promote special offers and discounts.

When paired alongside proper segmentation efforts, social media can be a very cost-effective way to engage and attract a wide array of new customers.

eCommerce guides to social media:
– Complete Guide to Instagram eCommerce in 2023
– How To Create a Twitter Marketing Strategy for Your Store
– TikTok: A Guide for eCommerce Business Owners

5. Test and Optimize Your Campaigns

Testing and optimizing your campaigns is essential to improving your eCommerce marketing campaign conversion rate. Test different elements of your campaigns, such as headline, copy, images, and CTAs, to see which ones are working best and make adjustments accordingly.

Note: Don’t overload your campaign tests! When A/B testing new elements in your campaign, only change one thing at a time. Making more than one significant alteration on a test will make it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to map a change in metrics to any one new element.

Top A/B testing platforms:
– AB Tasty
– Crazy Egg
– Google Optimize
– Optimizely

Final Thoughts

By following these above strategies, eCommerce marketers can work to create more effective campaigns that generate better conversion rates, maximize ROI, and help to bring the business to the next level.

For more eCommerce marketing-related content, check out:

What makes Noibu a crucial part of an eCommerce company’s long-term tech stack?

As an error detection, prioritization, and resolution tool, the first thing most folks do when they start their journey with Noibu is to clear out their initial backlog of errors. With their new ability to catch all existing and new customer-impacting errors on their site, eCommerce teams can immediately get to work on resolving long standing customer ticket issues that may have been missed due to a lack of data, or that have gone completely undetected over time.

Clearing out the backlog of errors from a site is, of course, a critical step in maintaining a healthy, well functioning website. But it’s what Noibu allows companies to do after they clear out their backlog that the magic really starts to happen.

Unfortunately, eliminating old bugs in your backlog doesn’t stop new bugs from being introduced into your site environment.

Because of the rapidly evolving nature of the internet, devices, browsers, IOS versions, ad blockers, etc. there are a seemingly endless amount of ways for users to interact with your site, and you’re simply not going to be able to anticipate and test for all of them. With the multitude of third party platforms that go into making your site functional, any time one of those platforms updates you run the risk of APIs and code no longer working together as expected. This is a big reason why 94% of all European eCommerce sites have at least 5 live, customer impacting errors on their site at any given time – and something tells us this isn’t just a European problem.

It is ultimately inevitable that errors will make their way back onto your website.

However, having Noibu in place ensures that all these errors are caught when they happen, so your team doesn’t have to worry about something breaking without them knowing.

An added benefit here is also the ability to be able to tie individual site errors back to support tickets that have come in. With Noibu’s Session Recording and Session Search features, Noibu users can easily associate a customer’s support ticket with the corresponding error in the console, helping your support team better address all new customer issues that arise.

Knowing that an error happened is great, but understanding how that error is impacting your business is even better. With every new error that occurs in your online funnel, Noibu collects its impact on conversion, and the resulting loss in revenue, which allows eCommerce managers to immediately see which errors are having the most detrimental effects.

Without access to business-impact data, eCommerce managers are left to guess which errors are the most severe. This creates a 3 pronged issue:

1. The team needs to spend time investigating an issue to get an understanding of how it’s affecting the buyer’s journey,

2. The team is not using key business data to make decisions, their decisions are driven by guesswork and emotion, and

3. The team risks sending off a resolution request to their developers for an error that doesn’t really impact the business’ bottom line, which leads the developers to spend time on a resolution that ultimately will not move the needle in a meaningful way.

By calculating the impact to the business’ bottom line by comparing a page’s metrics when the error isn’t present against the changes in metrics when the error is present, this refocuses the eCommerce team away from what other error detection tools focus on – occurrence numbers – and instead around the metrics that truly matter: revenue and conversions.

Triaging and handling errors can be a time consuming ordeal, and of course the part that takes the longest is the act of resolving the error. For developers, error resolution can take up a very large portion of their sprints.

“More than half of developers (55%) said that if they didn’t have to spend so much time fixing bugs, they would have the time to build new features and functionality. 42% of the total survey group said they would be able to do their job if not for the time spent on fixing bugs.” (BusinessWire)

The biggest contributor to the length of time it takes to resolve an error is the replication and revalidation workflow that needs to take place, and developers can reproduce bugs only 23% of the time.

The process of replicating an error is done to be able to collect the information the developers need to have on hand in order to resolve the error, and to confirm that the reported issue is having a negative effect on the intended customer journey. Data gathered during this process includes browser details, console calls, API interactions, user journeys, etc.

Because Noibu automatically collects all this data, and more, the developer workflow can be sliced away to become a lot more efficient and, ultimately, infinitely quicker.

As one of Noibu’s long-standing customers, Carrefour, stated, “Time is money so it’s important for us to help the team work quickly.”

Giving developers access to this level of data has allowed our customers to cut down on their average time to resolution by about 70%.

Beyond the platform itself, Noibu customers also gain access to a top-tier customer success team. Our Customer Success Managers work proactively with customers throughout their Noibu partnership to ensure the best possible experience for all teams, while also maximizing the customer’s ROI.

To learn more about what goes into our top-of-the-line support, check out our blog entitled How Does Noibu Help Customers Succeed.

Being able to know that all new site errors will be caught is a vital part of maintaining a healthy and functional website well into the future.

As you work to grow your eCommerce business, Noibu will be by your side every step of the way ensuring no error ever goes undetected. The platform will continue to enable your team to quickly prioritize based on your business goals and save time with swift resolutions and streamlined processes –  so you can focus on the future of your business, and not constantly worry about the state of your website. 

And with a dedicated, proactive CSM team to provide constant updates, industry insights, and recommendations, you can rest assured that you have a partner that only succeeds when you do.

We spoke with some of our customers and asked why they consider Noibu a critical tool in their long-term tech stack.

Carrefour
Jean Philippe concludes that the biggest win with having Noibu onboard long term is the ongoing “prioritization and the help for our development team to find their way in our [error tickets].”
Read more in Carrefour’s Case Study →

Customer patience for problems during their online shopping experience is at an all-time low.

How can product teams use prioritization data to help create a seamless experience and to make their own lives easier?

What is Prioritization Data?

Within the context of eCommerce site monitoring and error detection, prioritization data is anything that can be used to understand the scope of an error and the overall business impact. It is used by eCommerce and Product managers to better assess which issues need to be addressed first.

What Does Prioritization Data Look Like for Most Companies?

Right now, many eCommerce companies look at occurrence metrics to determine which errors are the most severe(or they immediately prioritize founder- or colleague- flagged errors, as was the case with Nudestix). Product and eCommerce teams are using the number of times an error was “seen” to determine which issues have the largest negative impact on the business, but is that really the best way to do this?

From what we’ve experienced talking with hundreds of eCommerce companies, this is not an effective method to prioritize issue resolutions.

Imagine this scenario:

There are two errors in front of you. Error #1 has occurred to 150 users, and Error #2 has occurred to 10 users.
At face value, you should select Error #1 to work on as it is clearly affecting more people, which should mean it’s more detrimental to the business.

Now imagine that you have access to additional data:

You learn that Error #1, while present on 150 page sessions, does not have an impact on the page’s conversion rate.
You learn that Error #2, while only present on 10 sessions, did have a significant impact on page conversion, and those 10 users that were showing high-intent buying behavior cannot complete their purchase journey.

When taking a look at the newly presented information, it’s now obvious that Error #2 should be addressed first as its impacting key business metrics: conversion rates and revenue.

What SHOULD Prioritization Data Look Like for All Companies?

Rather than looking at occurrence metrics, effective and data-driven eCommerce Product teams need to be looking at an error’s impact to key business metrics to truly understand the severity of an error.

Where occurrence metrics give an idea of severity, analyzing how an issue impacts a page’s conversion rate, and how an issue impacts a company’s ability to collect money from customers, provides the definitive view into issue severity.

This type of business-focused prioritization data is what Noibu focuses on, and what we vehemently believe should be the standard across all product teams.

How Does Proper Prioritization Fit into Key eCommerce Product Team Responsibilities?

A Product Manager is responsible for A LOT of functions, including needing to ensure that user-facing digital products – such as the website and mobile apps – are all working together as expected.

Unfortunately, it is inevitable that things will go wrong in an eCommerce environment. Being able to immediately detect those issues, and then quickly triage their resolutions based on company-impact, has proven to be a game-changer for product teams.

You can check out this case study to see an example of how access to prioritization data has helped the team at Princess Auto →

Using Prioritization Data to Assess and Triage Errors

When new errors are detected within an eCommerce environment, Product Managers typically have to look at the list of issues and determine which ones should be resolved first. They often then have to determine the importance of an error fix over other planned projects coming down the pipeline.

Without proper prioritization data, Product Managers have two choices when it comes to deciding what needs to be prioritized. They can either risk making an inaccurate assumption of impact and having the development team work on a resolution that isn’t going to be moving the needle significantly, or they will need to spend time investigating the issue themselves to better understand the impact of it.

Conversely, having the proper prioritization data that highlights an errors impact on page conversion and revenue allows Product Managers to immediately know what errors should be resolved first and whether or not those errors should take priority over other projects in the pipeline. This takes out the subjectivity of error analysis and ensures teams are only working on what actually matters.

Using Prioritization Data to Save Time and Resources

Having prioritization data collected and clearly displayed also helps Product Managers save on time and resources.

As mentioned above, when new errors get introduced into the eCommerce environment without clear impact data, Product Managers need to spend time investigating each individual issue to get an idea as to its severity. This process is not a quick or painless job, and requires time and energy to be taken away from other projects. In such a fast paced environment where time equals money, every minute of productivity counts.

Now, if this investigation step is skipped, or the wrong data points are analyzed to determine impact, the team runs the risk of asking their developers to spend hours on an error resolution that isn’t mission-critical to the business. By doing this, the product team is also taking key development resources away from that team. This temporary shift in developer focus would be justifiable if the error that is being resolved was creating a major blocker for business metrics. However, without the data to back it up, it’s a guessing game.

With the clear, proper data in place, all teams can make informed decisions about how to spend their time and resources.

Summary

Running a Product team without visibility into key metrics isn’t helpful for anyone. At best it results in time drains and guesswork for your Product Managers, and at worst it causes significant resources (from multiple teams) to be wasted on non-critical activities.

If you’re wanting to run a fast-paced, data-driven team, one that is hyper-focused on the business metrics that matter, proper prioritization data is going to be your best friend.

Noibu offers all this data, and so much more. If you’re interested in further learning about how Noibu’s platform can help your company, check out The Common Challenges Noibu Solves, or send us a message at info@noibu.com

Noibu’s customer success team was recently designated as #1 in Quality of Support out of all Website Monitoring tools on G2.

What can customers expect from their ongoing partnership with Noibu’s customer success teams? 

Overview

At its very core, our success team is incredibly hands-on and proactive. Every Noibu customer is assigned a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM)*, and that CSM’s performance is measured against and directly tied to their clients’ success. They are essentially an extension of a customer’s team.

Before getting set up with their dedicated CSM, all new customers will start their journey with an Onboarding Specialist. Noibu’s Onboarding Specialists will organize 1:1 training to ensure that everyone working in and around the product knows how to do so effectively and efficiently. They will align on company, team, as well as individual goals, and work to ensure everything is in place within the customer’s account (including workflows and priorities) to achieve those goals.

Further, our technical solutions team (whom customers have a direct line to) have been exposed to hundreds of different eCommerce setups – both custom and out of the box – and can work with customers to provide additional valuable insights and resolution suggestions to technical issues.

For the last 12 months, Noibu’s cumulative Net Promoter Score (NPS) has been sitting at 60. In comparison, the industry average NPS for SaaS companies is 41.

^{*Each CSM has a limited number of clients they will be assigned to, so as to ensure every customer gets the time, attention, and care they need.}

With you from the start: Onboarding

The customer onboarding journey is specifically tailored to meet the individual needs of each company. Noibu’s Onboarding Specialist presents a proposed onboarding journey based on your company’s makeup, and is completely flexible to ensure your team is comfortable and confident with the platform.

The initial kickoff call will be the time to align on overall company and team goals. The onboarding specialist will align on the KPIs that everyone on the customer’s team are committed to and what metrics they are looking to improve.

From there, the onboarding specialist will set up training sessions with all relevant teams. These sessions will be tailored to fit customers business goals and existing workflows. We also want to ensure everyone that wants to be trained on the product can be trained, so if more pin-pointed training is required, our specialists can set up additional sessions.

“No one is ever being thrown into the product with no idea as to what they need to do. Every player is trained up and 100% ready to go.”

After product training, a customer’s Onboarding Specialist will go through a workflow check in with the team, from start to finish, to make sure there are no gaps and that everyone’s roles and responsibilities are clear.

By the end of the onboarding period, customers can expect to have their:

1. First site bug resolved, at minimum
2. General workflow ironed out
3. Staff trained on how to use the tool and prioritize bugs
4. Developers understand where to go to find the right data
5. A clear mutual understanding of what success means to the company when using Noibu to facilitate a long term relationship

From here, customers are assigned a CSM who will be their main ongoing point of contact within Noibu.

Continued Partnership: Customer Success

Unlike most SaaS-based companies, where the support offering is usually limited to answering tickets and customer call-ins, Noibu offers a truly collaborative customer success function to all customers regardless of their business size.

The role of a Noibu CSM in their client relationship is to create a partnership. CSMs are responsible for continuously teaching and making proactive suggestions around error prioritization and triaging. Within the partnership, CSMs will:

1. Help customers understand how to use the data collected in the tool to debug and investigate issues,

2. Teach users how to find unique customer sessions and how to tie them back to customer tickets,

3. Proactively keep in contact with teams to ensure consistent use of the tool and to maximize customers’ ROI, and

4. Communicate any product feedback from customers back to Noibu’s product and development teams.

Part of this relationship also involves regular check-in meetings with product users. These can happen as frequently as the customer would like and are set with their individual CSM. It is during these meetings, also known as QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews), that CSMs: review and make recommendations as to what new errors to focus on in the funnel, update and train the team on any new features that have been launched, reiterate and realign on any new company goals, track progress towards an aggressive ROI, and gather any product feedback the customer may have.

As the subject-matter experts on all things Noibu, CSMs are here to act as an extension of a customer’s team. They provide a free second set of eyes, and collaborate closely with their customer’s eCommerce, Product, QA, Engineers teams.

But the CSM relationship isn’t the only connection they get with Noibu…

When You Get Stuck

eCommerce environments are complicated, and in times when a technical question or roadblock comes up that the customer’s development team may not be able to address, our CSMs can escalate an issue to our Technical Solutions team to work through a solution.

Our Technical Solutions team works with hundreds of customers who experience and deal with all types of issues, so they are incredibly knowledgeable and well equipped to direct other customers to the right areas to come to a solution.

Final Thoughts

From the day customers get started with Noibu, our success function is working to provide the best possible experience for users.

With a hands-on approach to onboarding and an ongoing proactive customer success partnership, our team works hard to bring customers the highest ROI, while helping to streamline workflows – even through the most complex scenarios/roadblocks and bugs. Noibu customers can be sure that they truly are getting top-tier post-sales services.

Don’t just take it from us, have a look at some of the feedback from our customers:

“Clear vision of issues and great support.”

“Great service and dedication. Will recommend Noibu.”

“Great team and product! Can’t ask for anything more!”

“Great account management, actively caring and trying to help; generally a good tool offering extra visibility into issues.”

“Great technical and customer support, great management!”

“The staff that we’ve worked with has been very helpful, supportive, and accommodating. I really get the feeling that they are invested in our success and they are willing to work with us to find solutions.”

“Great platform with intuitive features. One of the best tools that our company uses. Our success manager is outstanding and extremely helpful!”

“Great customer success program.”

“Excellent, ongoing support and service.”

“Noibu has a team that presents itself as best in class. Not only with its intuitive UI but also its customer service team.”

–

Ottawa, Ontario

We are excited to announce that Noibu has achieved High Performer status in G2’s Winter 2023 Grid® Report for both E-Commerce Tools and Website Monitoring categories by G2, the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace.

This recognition is based on the responses of real users for each of the product related questions featured in the G2 review form.

“We are honoured to be recognized by not only G2, but by our loyal customers, for our efforts in creating the best possible product for E-Commerce professionals.” Kailin Noivo, President, states, “We are thankful that we have such an active customer base willing to give us constant feedback as to how we can optimize our tool to better address their pain points. It is due to them, and our incredibly hard working team, that we are able to call ourselves High Performers in these competitive categories.“

Noibu achieved High Performer designation on the G2 Winter 2023 Report by receiving positive reviews, from verified users compared to similar products in the E-Commerce Tools category, as well as the Website Monitoring category. For inclusion in the report a product must have received 10 or more reviews. 

“Rankings on G2 reports are based on data provided to us by real software buyers,” said Sara Rossio, Chief Product Officer at G2. “Potential buyers know they can trust these insights when researching and selecting software because they’re rooted in vetted, verified, and authentic reviews.” 

Learn more about what real users have to say (or leave your own review of Noibu) on G2’s Noibu review page!

About G2

G2 is the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace. More than 80 million people annually — including employees at all of the Fortune 500 — use G2 to make smarter software decisions based on authentic peer reviews. Thousands of software and services companies of all sizes partner with G2 to build their reputation, manage their software spend, and grow their business – including Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoom, and Adobe. To learn more about where you go for software, visit www.g2.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Noibu

Serving SMBs and enterprise customers globally, Noibu is an industry leader in eCommerce error monitoring and lost revenue prevention. Noibu’s software platform monitors your eCommerce site and flags and prioritizes errors that prevent real customers from checking out, while collecting all the information required to quickly resolve them. For more information, visit www.noibu.com.

It’s the final days before Canadian Thanksgiving. ????

As a Canadian company, this is obviously the Thanksgiving we celebrate. But as our holiday quickly approaches, we are reminded that American Thanksgiving, and thus Black Friday and Cyber Monday, are also just around the corner.

The Fall, Autumn, Q4, End of Year… Whatever you want to call it, this is an especially busy and important time for eCommerce brands. Ensuring your platforms are optimized and in working order are absolutely critical to achieving success and taking advantage of the massive influx of shoppers (and thus, collectable revenue).

But if you’re reading this piece right now, you probably already knew that…

You also probably know that there are about 101 ways to optimize your website and product offerings. But I don’t have the time to advise you on all 101, and honestly do you really have the time to read about 101 solutions at this moment?

What I do have time for, though, is to write about 1 of those ways you can optimize your website in preparation for the next few holiday months, and I (and the statistics) would argue that this single solution is going to be the most impactful one you could implement…

So without further ado, let’s explore why addressing website errors is going to be the single most impactful thing you can do to prepare for Black Friday.

The Impact of Site Errors

Here are a few facts:

In 2023, revenue loss due to cart abandonment is expected to reach $493.52 Billion.

13% of abandoned carts are due to website errors.

Website errors are expected to be a $64.2 Billion dollar problem in 2023.

94% of all European eCommerce brands have at least 5 live, customer-impacting errors on their site.

90% of customers do not take the time to report a site error to the brand’s support team.

So not only are website errors clearly a universally-experienced and expensive problem, most retailers are only made aware of business-impacting bugs 10% of the time.

When nothing is in place to catch site errors when they happen, teams can go hours (or even days) without knowing something is up… And only realize there’s an issue when it’s far too late.

On Black Friday in 2018, J.Crew’s website experienced an error that was live for 5 hours. That error alone, on a single day, cost the company over $750,000 in sales. (Business Insider)

In 2015, GymShark experienced a Black Friday nightmare as well. The site, which was hosted on Magento at the time, was down for 8 hours. The outage resulted in an estimated $143,000 loss of sales. (Rewind)

Those are just two public examples of errors directly impacting brands’ revenue numbers on one of the most key shopping days of the year. While lost sales is obviously the most critical negative impact to one’s brand, the repercussions actually go beyond that. You can learn more by reading The Impact of Hidden eCommerce Errors.

Why Websites Crash AKA How Do Errors Happen

Okay, so we know the impact that errors have, but how do they happen? How do errors happen even after you’ve tested your site code in a staging environment? How do errors occur after the developers have triple checked their work and tested out user flows?

First things first, no developer is going to be perfect 100% of the time. Mistakes do happen.

Developers also aren’t psychic, they’re not going to know or even be able to test for all the different types of sessions and interactions that are going to happen on their website. (Think of all the permutations new devices, operating systems, browsers, emerging ad-blocking technologies, etc. could produce)

But, developers aren’t actually the culprit when it comes to most of the revenue-impacting bugs we’re seeing today. Instead, it has everything to do with your integrators and updates.

Updates happen all the time, but every time there’s a small change within a software of some other technology in your stack, there’s a risk that the new code or the new “rules” won’t interact with your site code as planned.

This can cause a multitude of problems including carts being unknowingly emptied when users go to inspect what they have added, buttons being rendered unresponsive, drop-down menus getting warped and blocking other content, payment gateways failing, pages not loading, and more.

To learn more about how site errors get introduced into your website without you knowing, check out our piece on Why Site Errors Aren’t Always Your Engineering Team’s Fault.

What Can Be Done to Prevent Detrimental Site Errors on Black Friday

Simply: Get an error monitoring tool in place!

An error monitoring tool will ensure your team has a clear view into the health of your website so your team always knows when there’s an error that’s impacting your potential customers.

Making sure you have a way to detect any and all site errors is of course the first, baseline step here. You’re going to want this in place well before Black Friday comes around so your team is already familiar with the tool, knows how to navigate it, and can understand what errors are live before the rush happens.

Once you have the monitoring software in place and collecting existing errors, your next order of business should be to clear out your backlog so you can be sure there is nothing lingering when Black Friday and Cyber Monday start. Deciding what needs to be resolved first, though, is where folks can lose a lot of time and effort.

With typical error monitoring platforms, users will usually get some form of occurrence data to run with. Occurrence data will tell you how many people are being affected by an error, but what it won’t tell you is how that error is manifesting itself and actually impacting your business metrics.

With just occurrence data available to base your prioritization of bug fixes on, eCommerce professionals need to spend time investigating errors individually to guess which ones have more pressing impacts, and then, if the guess that they make is wrong, their developers spend hours working on a solution that doesn’t actually move the needle.

Prioritization should not be done based on how many people are experiencing an error, but instead they should be based on the error’s financial impact to the business. That’s what really matters.

*Today, the only error detection software that offers individualized financial impact data for every error is Noibu. This is why we call ourselves a Revenue Recovery tool.

After prioritizing errors – hopefully by revenue loss – it’s time to send your fix requests off to your development team.

From there, your development team will have to reproduce the error, often multiple times, to find the root cause, then work to find a solution.

Here’s an example of the typical developer bug resolution workflow:

Or, if your development team has Noibu, they can just head to the Developer tab and get the information they would need to quickly start determining a fix. This takes the workflow shown above, to the more streamlined workflow seen below:

So What?

All of this is to essentially say, your business should always have a safety net to catch potentially lost revenue. An error monitoring tool, such as Noibu, provides that safety net you need.

Remember, it’s very easy to go to a different site and spend one’s money elsewhere. Brands need to make sure the buying process on their site is as seamless as possible.

Want a free site audit in preparation for Black Friday & Cyber Monday?

Send us a message at contact@noibu.com, or to me directly at katya.zeisig@noibu.com, with your domain and we’d be happy to provide you with a free website scan review!

This blog discusses the impact errors have on the eCommerce industry, explores the newest evolution in error monitoring, and explains why this new evolution is an absolutely crucial addition to eCommerce tech stacks.

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In 2023, lost revenue due to website errors is set to hit 64.2 Billion dollars.
^{*Calculated from Baymard’s 2022 Cart Abandonment Study}

Obviously having a sleek-looking, fast-reacting, top-of-the-line eCommerce website is critical in enabling online sales and creating a stronger Brand-to-Customer relationship. And in order to make that a reality, there are a ton of softwares and third party platforms that are integrated into your site.

Problem with that, though, is it opens the door for errors to be introduced into your system after you’ve tested everything in your staging environment. While your development team may have cleaned up all native-code-based errors before going live, new types of sessions and unscheduled platform updates happen all the time completely outside of your knowledge or control. These updates, or these untested user flows, can connect with your site code in ways it is not expecting, resulting in processes failing and users not being able to interact with site assets as desired or planned.

Now, we’re not suggesting that you should cancel all your third party integrators… That would be catastrophic for the operation of your website, and a completely unrealistic undertaking. 

What we are saying, though, is it is absolutely imperative to implement a system to ensure no errors come into your environment that your team doesn’t know about, and that the errors that are occurring can be caught and resolved as quickly as possible.

Many folks in the eCommerce industry would typically say these are all covered by implementing Error Monitoring processes.

To a large degree, that’s exactly right; eCommerce brands need to start monitoring their errors. But, it can’t just be about monitoring errors… There’s nothing novel or new about that conversation. What there needs to be, and is now coming to fruition, is another evolution in the error monitoring space, one that really brings home the business impact of errors.

To do this, we first need to stop thinking about website errors as just a UX inconvenience, and start thinking about them as what they really are: a detrimental revenue drain.

Errors Cause Massive Losses in Revenue

As you read at the beginning of this blog, revenue loss due to website errors is set to be an almost $65 Billion dollar problem in 2023. (Click here for further reading on the business impact of eCommerce errors)

Every day, we see brands where their products don’t load, where the Add-To-Cart button isn’t responsive, where the PayPal integration tosses prospective buyers into an infinite load, where the shipping details form doesn’t submit, where whole sections of the website are down. These cause users to drop off your website, to abandon their full carts, to not be able to finish their checkout process, and to leave money behind.

The sad part is – and your Marketers know this well – it takes A LOT of effort to get users onto your website. It takes even more effort to get those users on your site truly interested in navigating around it to see what you have to offer. There’s more effort once again to get those prospective customers to show true intent to buy something (Ex. adding something to their cart). And then of course, more effort still to get those customers to commit their hard earned money to purchase an item (or items) they haven’t even seen in person yet. (Learn more about how Revenue Recovery can be used in conversion rate optimization efforts)

Imagine, after all of the brain power and hours of work to get even a single individual onto your site and through all those buyer steps, that at the end of the line that prospective customer, who has their credit card ready and waiting for you, can’t actually give you their money.

Imagine this is happening in-store? A customer gets all the way up to the cash register with an arm-full of items and the cash register isn’t working. It’s literally like leaving money on the table.

So how do you recover that money? How do you stop more revenue from being lost?

This is where the idea of Revenue Recovery comes into play.

What is Revenue Recovery?

In the context of eCommerce tools, Revenue Recovery is the act of systematically prioritizing the removal and resolution of revenue-blocking errors that would have otherwise, if left unaddressed, forced money to be left behind.

How is this different from standard error resolution?

While error monitoring softwares focus on identifying errors that are affecting many users, regardless of the outcome and implications, a revenue recovery software prioritizes errors that are impacting your businesses most important metrics: revenue and conversions.

Revenue Recovery tools detect and prioritize the errors on your site that are having the largest negative impact to your conversions and revenue, ensuring that resources are allocated to only the most pressing issues.

Currently, eCommerce professionals looking into error monitoring have to make assumptions on impact based on occurrence metrics, have to spend time deciding which errors they think are important, then have to send off a set of fix requests to their product and development teams who then spend hours trying to replicate the issues, and then resolve them. (The average developer spends 25% of their time on error resolution workflows)

But guessing and knowing are two different things, and being able to quickly know what errors are losing your business revenue, at a glance, ensures efficient time management for your eCommerce team, your support team, and ultimately your development team.

Your executives will also be happy knowing that any time taken away from the developers’ core functions is still being spent on requests with guaranteed ROI.

How does Revenue Recovery compare to DXPs and APMs?

There are 2 widely recognized types of error monitoring softwares in the industry today: Application Performance Monitoring tools (APMs) and Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs).

Revenue Recovery has taken the best features from both.

Below we can see the differences in how the SaaS industry defines the different categories.

The DXP category is defined as follows:

Functionality
Provides a platform which links multiple applications together to form seamless digital experiences for customers
Value Props
1. Improved UX/UI; simpler, more seamless customer interactions
2. Improved conversion; less abandonment = more revenue
3. Allows integration of numerous software applications
Comparisons
– Decreases abandonment; not proactive, purely reactive
– Does not provide in-depth insights or metrics

The AMP category is defined as follows:

Functionality
Monitors website vitals and user experience; focuses on keeping core website functional and provides diagnostics
Value Props
1. Performance insights; allows for review of critical issues
2. Limits unexpected downtime (and ultimately conversions)
Comparisons
– Provides insights into backend causes of issues
– Provides lagging data to review issues after identified

In comparison, Noibu defines the Revenue Recovery category as follows:

Functionality
Monitors UX and website performance concurrently to capture and prioritize bugs which lead to abandonment and lost revenue
Value Props
1. Data-driven prioritization framework; revenue-centric bug list = only focusing on what will move the needle
2. Data visibility for developers; capturing the data required by developers to remove hours of manual work
3. Eliminates reliance on customer reporting or replication
Comparisons
– Captures UX and website vitals concurrently
– Captures and prioritizes real-time data for action and resolution

Summary

Having a Revenue Recovery tool in place makes sure you can stop relying on your customers to alert you to errors, ensures your team is never missing a bug on your website, forces your team to be more data-driven with their decisions, and enables efficient error resolutions.

Check out a few of our other blogs to learn more about the advantages of bringing on a Revenue Recovery tool, including:

– Preserving and Growing eCommerce Revenue During a Recession
– Catching Tech Debt in eCommerce: Why APMs Aren’t Enough
– There’s a New Way To Do CRO
– How Noibu’s Error Detection Improves Time Efficiency and Streamlines Workflows
– The Common Challenges Noibu Solves
– Why eCommerce Developers Love Noibu

Ottawa, Ontario

Noibu is pleased to announce it placed No. 28 on the 2022 Report on Business ranking of Canada’s Top Growing Companies.

Canada’s Top Growing Companies ranks Canadian companies on three-year revenue growth. Noibu earned its spot with three-year growth of 1,614%.

Noibu helps eCommerce websites detect revenue-impacting errors on their websites and provides them with the information needed to resolve them. Many websites rely solely on customers to inform them of errors occurring on their site. However, over 90% of website errors are never reported by customers. Noibu monitors your eCommerce site and flags errors in real-time. Whatever the cause, nothing gets missed.

Canada’s Top Growing Companies is an editorial ranking that was launched in 2019. It aims to celebrate the boldest entrepreneurial achievement by identifying and bringing the accomplishments of innovative businesses in Canada to the forefront. In order to qualify for this voluntary programs; companies had to complete an in-depth application process and fulfill requirements. In total, 430 companies earned a spot on this year’s ranking.

The full list of 2022 winners along with editorial coverage is published in the October issue of Report on Business magazine. The list is out now and online here.

“Canada’s Top Growing Companies recognizes the tremendous ambition and innovation of entrepreneurs in Canada,” says Dawn Calleja, Editor of Report on Business magazine. “The next generation of Canadian businesses can draw inspiration from this ranking.”

“In an uncertain world, the success stories of the companies marked in this year’s Report on Business magazine’s list of Top Growing Companies are a beacon of optimism,” says Phillip Crawley, Publisher and CEO of The Globe and Mail. “The Globe and Mail congratulates them on their achievements.”

About The Globe and Mail 

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s foremost news media company, leading the national discussion and causing policy change through brave and independent journalism since 1844. With our award-winning coverage of business, politics and national affairs, The Globe and Mail newspaper reaches 5.9 million readers every week in our print or digital formats, and Report on Business magazine reaches 2.3 million readers in print and digital every issue. Our investment in innovative data science means that as the world continues to change, so does The Globe. The Globe and Mail is owned by Woodbridge, the investment arm of the Thomson family. 

About Noibu

Serving SMBs and enterprise customers globally, Noibu is the industry leader in eCommerce error monitoring and lost revenue prevention. Noibu’s software platform monitors your eCommerce site and flags and prioritizes errors that prevent real customers from checking out, while collecting all the information required to quickly resolve them. For more information, visit www.noibu.com.

Website errors are a part of having an online presence – whether you like it or not.

With hundreds of news ways to navigate to and around your site (think of all the different devices, IOS and operating system versions, browsers, browser extensions, ad blockers), and the countless number of third-party plugins that go into your eCommerce store, it’s next to impossible to test out every user flow and configuration your website will need to accommodate.

And with unannounced third-party platform updates, browser updates, and payment-gateway changes, your site infrastructure isn’t always going to be prepared to seamlessly handle these new data flows and interactions on the fly. (Learn more about how errors get introduced into your eCommerce environment)

This is probably why, according to a study conducted by consultancy firm Edgar, Dunn & Company, 94% of all (European) eCommerce websites have at least 5 live, customer-impacting errors on their site at all times.

With the help of the Baymard Institute, we also know how expensive of a problem these errors equate to on an industry-scale.

Below is a chart depicting the top 10 reasons US-based consumers abandon their online shopping carts.

You can see that ‘Website Errors’ are listed as the 7th most likely reason for abandonment, sitting at 13%. When paired with the total revenue loss of $493.52 Billion due to abandoned carts projected for the year 2023, website errors are expected to lose businesses $64.2 Billion in a single year.

So we can conclude that website errors are not only happening, but are gravely impacting eCommerce brands’ most important metric: revenue.

But you probably already knew that.

In the case of almost all eCommerce brands, eComm professionals are already hearing about site errors from their QA department or through their customers. What they’re needing is a better way to identify which ones are the most pressing and a faster way to find a resolution to those errors.

That is what this piece is going to help you with.

*In a rush? Scroll down to the Summary to get the bare-bones statistics that we will be unpacking throughout this blog

How is your team deciding what support tickets or detected site errors to address first?

If you’re exclusively hearing about site errors through your customers and support tickets, you’re really not getting a lot of data to work with. You may be given what url the error happened on, and maybe some information on the action the potential customer was trying to take, but you’re really at the mercy of your customer. You’re not going to know how many people a specific error is affecting, or how it is impacting your conversion numbers.

If you have an Application Performance Monitoring tool in place, you may look to occurrence metrics as a way to determine what errors should be addressed first. More eyes on an issue means more critical, right? Not exactly.

Unfortunately, occurrence data is only an indicator towards the true business metric that matters, which is revenue.

An image that isn’t loading properly for 100+ customers, but isn’t impacting any of those users’ ability to shop and checkout isn’t actually that critical. But a Javascript error causing the Add Shipping Details button to not work for 5 customers that are using Firefox on a tablet, that’s going to be blocking actual dollars from coming in.

So, how do you concretely know what site errors are having meaningful impacts on your bottom line, and how do you do this quickly?

You could gather all your known site errors and individually investigate each one, figure out the symptoms of the error, and what it looks like for your customers. From there you can make some assumptions about the drop in conversion and the resulting loss of revenue. But that isn’t a short process.

With Noibu, you can see all detected errors in one place. But instead of having to spend time investigating and guessing which ones have the most grave impact, everything is already calculated out and prioritized for you. All errors have conversion and revenue impact data automatically calculated and displayed, so your team can quickly decide what needs to be actioned and when, all in a matter of seconds.

Having automatically prioritized errors based on revenue and conversion impact ends up eliminating the time spent on investigative and/or guesswork to pick out errors for development sprints, and ensures that any time that is being spent on error resolution will move the needle in a meaningful, positive direction.

Error resolution is also creating a time-consuming headache for your development team

An interesting study was conducted by the folks at Rollbar, where they asked 950 developers about their relationship with error resolution. The results were quite telling.

“Nearly two-thirds of all developers said they would rather do an unpleasant activity than fix errors. More than a fourth (26%) said they would rather pay bills. More than a fifth (21%) said they would prefer going to the dentist. And 20% would rather spend time with their in-laws.” (BusinessWire)

That’s pretty harsh feedback, right?

While of course those statistics are a bit tongue-in-cheek, the real concerning set of statistics that this study uncovered was the amount of time being sunk into error resolution.

– 32% of developers spend up to 10 hr/wk on fixing bugs
– 16% spend up to 15 hr/wk on fixing bugs
– 6% spent up to 20 hr/wk on fixing bugs

“More than half of developers (55%) said that if they didn’t have to spend so much time fixing bugs, they would have the time to build new features and functionality. 42% of the total survey group said they would be able to do their job if not for the time spent on fixing bugs.” (BusinessWire)

Wow.

This number of hours dedicated to bug resolution lines up with what we’ve seen with prospects as well. Keeping it conservative, the average eCommerce development team dedicates approximately 25% of their sprint time to error resolution.

With 7 hour days (8 hours with an hour for lunch), 5 days in an average work week, and 2 weeks for typical dev sprints, this comes out to around 17.5hrs spent fixing bugs per developer per sprint.

This equates to about 2 and a half full days of development time solely being spent on error resolution. In other words, that’s 2.5 days of innovation and feature work not being worked on. Every single sprint.

Why does this process take so long?

In order to fix a bug, developers need to know where the error is, what actions and circumstances cause the error to occur, what happens when the error occurs (both from a user perspective, and a code perspective), and where to go to apply the fixes.

Traditional error monitoring softwares don’t provide a comprehensive collection of this data, meaning development teams have to go through what they call replication workflows to determine the root cause of an error, and the corrective action that needs to be taken.

The process looks something like this:

Noibu’s software is unique in that it can provide the data that would previously only be able to be captured by going through these repetitive replication workflows.

With a comprehensive developer tab for every detected site error, and session recordings, the need to spend hours and hours trying to rebuild the error to fix the error can be eliminated… Changing the workflow from what we see above, to this:

With this new, streamlined workflow in place, our customers have noted an average drop in time to resolution by 70%.

Rather than 17.5 hours of every sprint being dedicated to error resolution per developer, the average Noibu-using developer only spends around 4.5 hrs on error resolution.

All this means that Noibu customers can ensure that their critical errors are active for the least amount of time possible, and their developers can get back to doing what they love: developing new code.

The CTO and Director of Engineering also get the added bonus of knowing that the time their team does dedicate to error resolution is guaranteed to move the needle for the business.

Summary

Okay, that was a lot of data thrown your way. Let’s summarize the current state of eCommerce error detection and resolution:

– 13% of all abandoned carts are due to website and checkout errors
– In 2023, it is projected that abandoned carts due to website errors will cause $64.2 Billion in lost revenue for eCommerce brands
– Most eCommerce teams hear about website errors through customer support tickets
– 90% of customers do not take the time to report a site error to the brand
– An average of 25% of a development sprint is spent fixing bugs, translating to approximately 17.5 hours per developer per sprint
– 42% of developers say that being tasked with error resolution stops them from being able to do their job

What the reality could look like with Noibu:

– Confidence that all errors impacting conversion and revenue are immediately detected, reported, and surfaced to relevant teams
– No more reliance on customers to act as your quality assurance team
– Immediate knowledge of most pressing errors (errors are automatically prioritized based on business metrics)
– 70% developer time reduction due to availability of data and the streamlining of resolution workflows

Time reduction isn’t the only benefit to adopting a data-driven approach to error monitoring. See how top online retailers such as Guess saw a 6% increase in conversions, how brands Joe Browns and Ruroc both achieved an over 40x ROI, how furniture brand Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams saved nearly $1 million in revenue, and more by heading to our collection of case studies.

What are the leading causes of cart abandonment in the eCommerce industry?

The Baymard institute recently conducted a research study, asking over 4000 US-based online consumers the reason they abandoned their shopping carts during the checkout process.

Of course, no one is surprised to see “Additional Costs” listed as the #1 reason for abandonment… But let’s take a look at the rest.

These are all legitimate reasons to leave a transaction behind, and some are easier to address than others. For the purpose of this piece, we’re going to zoom in on the 7th most likely reason: website errors.

Industry impact of website errors

For the industry as a whole, revenue loss due to abandoned carts is projected to reach $493.52 Billion by 2023.

13% of those abandoned carts are going to be due to website errors.

Which means that website errors are going to be a $64.2 Billion dollar a year problem.

How does the 64 Billion Dollar problem apply to you?

Anything in the billions starts to get a little too big to accurately visualize… So let’s bring this down from an industry level to an individual brand standpoint.
_{*scroll to the end of this blog to find individual brand stories, including how hidden site errors almost lost a company $1 million in unrealized revenue}

No website is perfect.

No matter how amazing your developers are, no matter how many times your code goes through review in your staging environment, bugs are going to happen.

There are a few reasons why site errors happen, and no, most of them aren’t actually your developers’ fault. Most of them are due to either the hundreds of new methods used to access and navigate through your site or they are due to third party updates. (Learn more about how errors are introduced into your site post-launch)

But regardless of how errors happen, they are happening. It is estimated that 94% of eCommerce sites have at least 2 customer-impacting errors live on their site at any given time.

So, what’s being done about that today?

How are you hearing about errors on your site? When we ask prospective customers this, 99% of the time their response is, “We wait to hear about them through customer tickets.”

If you’re serious about not adding more lost revenue to the collective projected loss of $64 Billion industry-wide, that method is not going to be good enough.

Why? We have another stat for you…

How Do Errors Stay Hidden

Only 1 in every 10 customers will take the time out of their day to report a site error to your team.

In other words, 9 times out of 10, eCommerce teams are not being notified about errors on their site.

That’s 90% of your site errors remaining left in the dark to block other potential customers from converting, too.

To make things even worse, even though most customers don’t take the time to let your brand know about errors, they certainly let other people know.

So as much as these errors may be hidden for you, they’re not for your potential customers.

And unfortunately, word of mouth is definitely the most impactful, lasting impression you can get… Whether it’s negative or positive.

Errors Impacting Sentiment and Loyalty

In the days where in-person shopping was the only option, brand loyalty was pretty easy to lock in. Now with 100s of new options to choose from for online retailers at the click of a button, brand loyalty is a little harder to nail down.

We know that trust and public opinion are major influences on buying decisions, and now that marketing tactics are really being seen for what they are (as marketing tactics), consumers are turning to other consumers to get their information.

And if potential customers, when turning to other consumers, see negative sentiment around a brand, they’re going to be significantly less likely to even give your site a try.

This creates a snowball effect of disgruntled, frustrated customers turning off other potential customers, making it increasingly difficult to grow your customer base and hit growing conversion and revenue goals.

So What?

So, what’s to be done about this?

Your first step is going to be to find some way to pick up on all your site errors.

But this isn’t a piece on pitching error monitoring platforms. If it were, we would of course suggest trying out Noibu’s system… But we may be a little bit biased.

To learn more about error monitoring, and to get a better understanding of how monitoring and resolving site errors helps your company increase conversions and revenue, streamlines workflows, and improves customer experience, check out the following blogs:

The Common Challenges Noibu Solves
Preserving and Growing eCommerce Revenue During a Recession

To see the results of other major eCommerce brands uncovering and resolving hidden errors, check out a few of our case studies:

• How Champion saw an 18x ROI after uncovering and resolving checkout bugs
• How Moschino solved 120 site errors and achieved an ROI of over 90x
• How Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams saved nearly 1 million of annualized revenue
• How Scrubs & Beyond achieved a 123.3x ROI using error monitoring software
• How Guess improved their conversion rate from 82% to 88%

Look, there are about 1000 guides out there providing super valuable tips and tricks on how to do eCommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO). I’m not going to bother regurgitating them.

What I would like to share, though, is a new CRO-esque angle that eCommerce professionals can tack onto their ongoing CRO projects to help their efforts go the extra mile.

At Noibu, we call this angle Revenue Recovery… But that probably doesn’t mean much right now.

So let me set the stage.

What Is The Problem?

Put in the quickest way possible, the problem is site errors.

All the page optimization in the world won’t help you if, at the end of the line, your visitors are met with an error blocking them from completing a key buying action.

Conversion Rate Optimization is all about user experience and pulling focus into the right directions…

But no matter how many hours you sink into user research, heat-maps, new copy, revamped page structures, and A/B testing, and no matter how compelling your CTAs are, it’s not going to matter if the site itself isn’t letting users complete that conversion action! Your team’s hard work isn’t going to matter if an error on a key webpage is altering its functionality in a way you hadn’t anticipated or tested.

These errors create a bad UX and sometimes completely remove the viability of your conversion points; they’re nullifying your CRO efforts.

It’s like getting prepared for battle with training and armor, but not having a sword to actually do the fighting. (Yes, I did just watch House of The Dragon)

Or I guess, in a more eCommerce-related sense, it’s like hiring an interior designer to optimize the layout of your brick-and-mortar store only to not have a cash register.

How Does This Problem Occur?

Marketers know there are at least 100+ permutations of journeys on their eCommerce site: taking into account different browsers, browser extensions, ad-blockers, devices, page-paths, product pages, and more.

The fact of the matter is that it’s always going to be next to impossible to test out every single possible user flow.

Websites also aren’t completely self-sustained. There are numerous third-party integrations that go into your website to make it function as desired, and those third party platforms and softwares are going to be updating from time to time.

Every update or untested user flow opens the door for something to not react as expected or for a connection to break. This leads to an error message being served, a payment integration to be stuck in an infinite-load, pages to come up blank, a CTA button not being responsive, redirects to jump around… You get the picture.

With all that in mind, it’s no surprise that research shows that about 94% of eCommerce sites have at least 2 customer-facing errors live at any given time.

And without anything to properly pick up on those errors, your conversion numbers are going to be dropping and you’re going to be losing opportunities for more sales (aka, revenue).

How Do These Errors Affect Other Marketing Functions?

Conversion rates aren’t the only thing affected by eCommerce site errors.

Bounce rates and Avg Time on Page can also be negatively affected by customer-facing bugs.

Consumers today expect instant gratification. They expect it because they get it everywhere, including on your eCommerce site… Except for the times when they don’t.

If consumers are expecting instant gratification, and normally get that on your site, they’re going to be frustrated when there is something blocking them from reaching their goal, whether it’s to explore a new section of your site, view a product, peruse sizing, check their cart, etc.

If they can’t do that, the most likely next step they’re going to take is to exit out, or bounce, without spending much time on the page… And they will often do this without letting the brand know that there’s an issue. (Only 1 in 10 customers report site errors back to brands)

On a more technical side, eCommerce bugs can also cause elements on a page to load slowly, or not at all. Search engine bots take this into account when evaluating the health, reliability, and user friendliness of a website and it can affect your SERP ranking abilities down the road. As with the Time on Page metric, a slow time to load similarly creates a poor user experience.

How Can Mitigating Errors Be Used to Increase Conversion?

Once eCommerce brands start focusing on resolving bugs and improving site health, an increase in conversion is going to happen naturally.

If you’re cleaning up your errors, you’re improving your customer experience and eliminating forced (and previously undetected) drop-off points.

We have seen this positive impact with many major eCommerce brands, including Guess which saw a 6% increase in conversions after implementing Noibu’s error monitoring software.

Champion has also seen great success in improving conversion rates by focusing on resolving bugs.

How Can You Actually Monitor and Resolve Errors, and Why We Call This Revenue Recovery?

In order to start managing the health of your website, and in turn improving your conversion rates, you need to have an error monitoring software to pick up on bugs throughout your entire website. These softwares typically require a simple tag to be added to the code of your site, and from there they track sessions on your eCommerce environment.

When an error occurs, users are alerted to the issue and, in the case of Noibu’s error monitoring software, the session is recorded, the line of code that caused the error will be highlighted, the effects of the error will be captured, and it will be served into a site-errors overview list.

From that every-growing list of errors, you’re going to need to figure out what bugs need to be fixed first… You need a way to prioritize.

Most error monitoring platforms don’t actually provide a lot of data off the bat to help users prioritize errors beyond occurrence data. And occurrence data is fine… But that metric only hints at the real business impact users are trying to understand: conversion and revenue loss due to said error.

If an error isn’t affecting either of those, why bother prioritizing it?
If an error is affecting revenue or conversion, you’re going to want to solve it ASAP.

This is where the idea of Revenue Recovery comes in.

When Noibu detects an error, it also calculates the revenue impact and conversion impact of that error. This allows your teams to immediately know if your site is losing sales due to a given error, and can work towards a resolution to ensure no further revenue is lost, without wasting time on less urgent errors.

The idea is that this data helps bring attention back to the On Metric That Matters for eCommerce: Revenue. It changes the conversation from “What is the cost of the time to resolve an error?” to, “What is the cost if we don’t fix this error?”

Why is Revenue Recovery Particularly Helpful During Uncertain Economic Times?

Whenever tough financial times are looming, the first department’s budget to get cut is almost always marketing.

When companies need to save money, they’re going to be slashing your marketing budget which will make it a lot harder for you to fill up the top of the funnel with more traffic.

But, your budget isn’t going to stay slashed forever. Eventually, you will get your resources back and then it’s time to go full speed ahead.

The advantage of investing in cleaning up your website before this happens, and implementing a fool-proof way to pick up on any new revenue-impacting errors, is that the effort and investment actually compounds itself when the market recovers.

By eliminating conversion-blocking errors, when you do eventually start pouring more visitors into your website, they’re not going to be blocked from completing conversion actions.

Plus, with Noibu’s revenue-attribution calculations, you can also attribute a revenue-saved number to the time and effort being dedicated to error resolutions.

For a deeper dive into this topic, you can read my blog on Preserving and Growing eCommerce Revenue During a Recession.

Curious about the health of your site?

Send us a message at contact@noibu.com, or to me directly at katya.zeisig@noibu.com, with your domain and we’d be happy to provide you with a free website scan review!

Let’s be real for a second. It’s getting increasingly harder to spend your way out of anonymity.

Hundreds of thousands of businesses went digital after the start of the pandemic. Former exclusively in-person shoppers had to change their habits and get used to online browsing. This was great; it allowed brands to continue selling, and it limited in-person transmission in stores.

Consequently though, this massive shift to digital has saturated the eCommerce market. And while we are seeing an unprecedented number of online shoppers ready to generate traffic, this saturation has made it increasingly harder to garner the attention of those shoppers.

As well, with massive increases in SERP (Search Engine Results Page) views, availability of traffic, and an increasing number of competitor options, search engines and social platforms that allow for hosted advertising have recognized a new opportunity to increase bid prices, thus skyrocketing CAC and decreasing ROAS for brands.

Tacking on iOS updates that have made geo-targeting less relevant, marketers tasked with filling the top of their company’s funnel are being forced to pay more money for less quality traffic. And even worse, they have to fight even harder for that traffic than they did before.

What’s getting cut during tough times?

Now, we ALSO have to tackle the recession. When a recession is looming, what’s the first to get cut?

Marketing budget.

When a company is deciding to “go back to basics” (the typical plan of action during uncertain economic times) the first thing to be slashed is always the marketing budget.

At the same time, though, how are brands going to grow their revenue if they’re pulling back on marketing resources?

The trick is going to be to focus on the traffic and the customers you already have. You’re going to want to focus on being able to get every dollar (or yen, or euro, or pound, or peso) that the folks already on your site are willing to spend.

How do we do this? By focusing on the efficiency and, most importantly, the health of your website.

Thinking about your eCommerce site as a physical store

Did you know that 94% of eCommerce sites have at least 2 customer-impacting errors on their site at any given time?

Many people adopt the mindset that site errors are just a part of having a digital presence, and so long as these bugs are not causing a site-wide outage, there’s a general lack of urgency around addressing them.

Why is that?

We know that site errors lead to poor user experience, and poor user experience leads to customers exiting out of the site… And possibly never coming back.

Now, imagine your eCommerce site is a physical store. Imagine seeing actual customers walking out of your store because your registers are down or because they can’t pick up a product from the shelf to view it. The store manager is going to see those customers walking out, recognize that that is a lost revenue opportunity, and they’re going to be motivated to make sure that doesn’t continue to happen.

The same thing is occurring today on eCommerce sites, but why isn’t that urgency translating over?

A major reason is because there’s a KPI that isn’t being talked about.

In eCommerce, we track CRO, revenue generation, time-on-page, CAC, etc. but we’re not talking about, and consequently not accurately tracking, loss.

And if something isn’t being measured, it’s not being managed.

So…

Why do we need to measure and manage loss, what does that look like, and why is this going to be one of your most important metrics to look at during tough economic times?

Quantifying loss

Being able to attribute a hard revenue number to any site error is absolutely key for quantifying the true impact of errors, and, more importantly, showing which errors need to be fixed first.

Because when an error prompts a potential customer to exit your site, that is actual money being left behind that you can’t grab. And during a time where you want to make every dollar count, a leaking bucket can be lethal.

Let’s take a look at this example:

You’ve been notified of a fringe error that’s occurring approximately 3 times a week, affecting 5 sessions each time. With just that data, it’s not going to seem like a big deal, so it would be easy to sweep it under the rug and focus on something else.

But that error does equate to 15 sessions in a week that could have turned into successful sales.

With eCommerce AOV sitting at around $58 USD (conservatively), that’s $870 in revenue that was blocked in that week alone. And if it’s swept under the rug, it’s going to keep compounding week after week.

After a year of that low-velocity, “low priority” error sitting in the backlog, you’ve lost $45K in revenue that should have come in.

So, rather than looking at errors and judging their priority based gut-feel and number of occurrences, using data that is tied directly to the most important eCommerce metric – revenue – will allow you to make data-backed decisions that can guarantee a higher ROI than you would have been able to get without it.

Using Noibu to get your house in order

During a recession, most businesses scale back their resources and focus on going back to the basics.

Your website is the face of your business; in eCommerce it’s the only place to make money. So focusing on the health of your basics – your website – is paramount during tough economic times.

And what constitutes an unhealthy site?

An unhealthy site would be one that has broken user experience flows and errors blocking customers from completing buyer actions, among other things.

But of course, if you’re going back to basics, you’re going to make sure that your site is all cleaned up. Though what happens after?

You could implement a code freeze so your team can be “sure” no other issues will be introduced through new releases from the development team… But the reality of the situation is that even when you’re in a code freeze, your code isn’t actually frozen.

Your browsers and third party integrators aren’t going to stop updating. And these updates interact with your site, and sometimes they don’t interact as expected!

So, you can try to catch these unexpected errors manually if you’d like. You can get your developers and QA team to test out every single possible flow on the site, check with every device, browser, ad-blocker software, method of payment, page paths, and more. AND do that every single time ANYTHING connected to your website updates.

That’s going to take a ton of hours, and it’s certainly not efficient.

But without a proper, ongoing view into your entire site, these changes by third parties and thus any resulting errors are going to fly under the radar for you…

But not so much for your potential customers.

Noibu’s error monitoring software covers this function, and then some.

Having site-wide monitoring capabilities and capturing every possible site error occurring on your web store, users can rest assured that any new error that pops up is brought to their attention before it has the chance to stop hundreds of eager customers from being derailed in their buyer’s journey.

You can think of Noibu in this aspect as sort of a Ring security camera for your home. Instead of a security system to notify you of any security threats, Noibu monitors your entire site and alerts you to all existing and incoming bugs.

There are many other benefits to having this particular monitoring software in place beyond just alerting you to site errors, too.

Going beyond visibility

Okay, so you’re now being alerted to all your site errors. What’s the difference between Noibu and other tools that perform site monitoring, then?

It comes back to that KPI that isn’t being talked about: Loss.

Specifically, revenue loss.

Without data around the economic or conversion impact of any one bug, how are product, eCommerce, and development teams going to know which errors to resolve first?

Noibu automatically calculates revenue and conversion impact data for every error, and projects the annualized effects of the error remaining active on site.

Having this impact data available at a glance allows users to quickly pinpoint the errors that they know will have a strong ROI, without needing to perform time-consuming error investigation, so developers aren’t wasting their time trying to resolve an error that doesn’t move the needle in a meaningful way.

Being efficient, Saving time

Another way Noibu helps eliminate time-drains and enables more efficient workflows is the information that is captured and packaged for developers.

For every error, Noibu’s software grabs the line of code that is causing an error to be served, the symptoms users are experiencing in relation to that error, the last step users took before encountering the error, the browsers and devices of the sessions that experienced the error, and real-customer session replays.

Why is that useful?

It eliminates the need for tedious, time-consuming replication workflows that look something like this:

And instead, turns the workflow into this:

During times when businesses are scaling back resources… Just imagine the amount of time and involvement that could be saved moving from the first workflow to the second one.

The elimination of the replication workflows and the ability to have data-driven prioritization aren’t the only time-saving functionalities, though.

Think about how many hours your support and development teams have to spend trying to understand an imperfect support ticket that’s been submitted.

Noibu’s session search functionality allows users to find the exact customer session that experienced a bug, and coupled with real-time session replay they can see exactly what went wrong, and determine the severity of the error.

The TLDR; How does this save my revenue?

You can think of your website like a bucket (switching it up from the home security system!). Your marketing budget is the faucet filling it up, and site errors are the holes that are letting the water (aka possible sales) leak out.

During smooth economic times, the faucet will be providing enough water to keep the bucket full even with holes letting some of the water out. But without the faucet running… Those holes become a much bigger problem and will make it impossible to fill the bucket to the rim (aka meet your revenue goals).

If you patch up these holes now, and get something in place to alert you when a new one forms while also giving you the tools you need to fix it, you’ll be able to not only maintain the water level, but also be able to increase the amount in the bucket! Then, when your faucet is ready to be turned back on again, you’ll see compounding results.

Want proof? Here are a few customers that are seeing massive benefits to bringing on this kind of software:

How MGBW has saved nearly $1 Million in annualized revenue
How Joe Browns achieved an ROI of 48x in 4 months
How Scrubs and Beyond achieved a 123x ROI by maintaining their site health
How luxury clothing brand, Moschino, improved their UX and achieved a 99x ROI
Why DLT Trading says their 47% growth in sales is supported by error monitoring

And more…

What is a Noibu Proof of Concept?

Noibu’s Proof of Concept (POC) is a 2 week trial period where we deploy the error detection tag to your eCommerce environment to start capturing data as one would with a full Noibu license.

After this time, your account executive will log into the console to show your team exactly what the software would look like for your business.

Why is my account executive pushing for a POC?

We get this question a lot, so we figured we would create a quick explainer on the purpose of doing a POC with you.

The quick answer is: It helps you visualize how Noibu can slot into your current workflows with your own data. No demo data or environment.

There’s more that goes into it though, so let’s break it down.

Why Do a POC?

Noibu’s POC has a few goals that it accomplishes:

1. Confirming the presence of site bugs
2. Confirming the value and scope of site bugs
3. Confirming how the tool works within your individual ecosystem and case
4. Confirming how the tool can slot in with your existing workflows

1. Confirming the presence of site bugs

We often talk to eCommerce managers who – either through gut-feel, through a digital experience tool, or through customer tickets – know there are errors on their site, but say that it’s increasingly difficult to confirm what these issues are or how many are currently live and affecting customers.

Noibu’s tag will pick up on all errors affecting your customers over the 2 week POC period, confirming (or denying) the presence of site errors, so you can know definitively if there is a problem that needs to be solved.

2. Confirming the value and scope of site bugs

The most common way for eCommerce teams to hear about site issues is through customer support tickets. We also know that approximately only 1 in 10 potential customers ever take the time to submit a ticket when they experience an onsite error. As well, without a holistic view into all errors, it’s a guessing game as to whether or not revenue and conversions are being impacted by errors on your site.

Noibu’s software is able to calculate the negative impact to revenue and conversions associated with any given error; this function is also included in our POCs. Visibility into these metrics provides your team, and us, with an idea of the potential damages site errors are currently causing you… do you have a $5,000 issue under the hood or a $1,000,000 issue? This will hopefully give you a good idea as to if your business can expect to see an aggressive ROI with the tool. 

3. Confirming how the tool works within your individual ecosystem and case

Every eCommerce store is unique, and you likely have questions as to whether or not Noibu can work with your current tech stack, what types of errors will be surfaced, and what that will look like with your own data.

The Noibu POC gives you the opportunity to see exactly what your team will be viewing and working with in the tool.

Why is this so important to us? It’s because we know it’s one thing to discuss conceptual values and scope in a demo environment with demo data… It’s another thing entirely to see it applied to your specific case.

4. Confirming how the tool can slot in with your existing workflows

If you can’t see yourself working with a tool, that’s the point? You’ll either not end up buying it, or you’ll end up purchasing it only to have it sitting in the background as a money-drain. We don’t want that for potentially mission-critical tools.

With the POC, once you have your own information in the software, your own stacks, your own session videos… it’s easier to visualize how Noibu is going to slot into existing team workflows. Your developers and product owners can dive into the console and see, first hand, how their workflows could be improved with Noibu, without having to extrapolate on dummy data, and without being shoved into a new environment post-sale.

Because, ultimately, we aren’t here to cause a major disruption. We’re here to make processes more data-driven, efficient, and effective.

Chances are you’re already trying to detect your site issues, you’re already trying to prioritize them and manage them in your scrums, you’re already trying to resolve them as easily as possible (most often fuelled by replication workflows). Noibu makes that a lot easier and quicker… But the best way to confirm that is to see it for yourself.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out directly to your account executive. If you’d like to get a POC for your own eCommerce business, send us a message at info@noibu.com!

AKA Why This Will Be Your New Favourite Tool

You don’t have a lot of time, so let’s just cut right to the chase… Why does Noibu have the potential to be your favourite tool? Or at the very least, how can Noibu ease some of your major development woes?

Put very simply, Noibu is the automated eCommerce error detection and revenue recovery tool that saves you from doing hours of bug reproductions and helps you operate in a leaner fashion.

Can you imagine how much more time you would have on your hands if you didn’t have to do your own digging to find the root cause of an error? Can you imagine how much more efficient your sprints would be if the beautified stack traces for errors were served to you on a silver platter?

With Noibu, you don’t have to imagine.

Noibu’s software captures all Javascript and HTTP errors and gives you the tools to determine which bug fixes should be prioritized, see the actual broken line of code, and visualize the user impact of the bug through session recordings.

But, let’s actually break down how these functionalities help you.

Prioritizing bug fixes

What metrics are you currently looking at to determine what errors should be prioritized? How do you decide which errors are having a bigger impact on the business and thus should be addressed before working on a new feature that the product team has been pushing for?

Speaking with some industry professionals who have previously used other error monitoring software in their developer role, the tools“were capturing our site errors… But they were just a regurgitation of information. Our team would arbitrarily round up what we believed to be the top 10 errors and get to work…”

Unfortunately, the tools they were using never really gave an indication as to how important any one error was.

The result of this? Without data on conversion drops, revenue loss, or the nature of the error, the teams would spend a day (or even 2, evidently) of development time trying to figure out what was actually going on with the “top 10” errors and confirm their severity.

When Noibu displays errors in the summary tab, developers can see the nature of errors occurring, whether it’s a Javascript or HTTP error, the resulting drop in conversion, and the overall revenue implications of any error all without needing to do further investigation.

TLDR; Stop spending hours investigating the legitimacy and urgency of a bug. Noibu lets developers view error types along with conversion and revenue impact to properly determine, in a matter of seconds, what should be worked on and when.

Providing Context for Fix Requests

How often does your development team get forwarded a fix request from the support team spurred on by a customer ticket? And how often does the request look something like, “Developers! A customer just called in to complain that the website is broken. Fix it.”

To be fair, it’s not your support team’s fault that they can’t provide you with enough contextual data around a fix request.

Unless the customer is technical and incredibly kind enough to write out everything they did to encounter that error, both your support team and your fellow developers are going to be stuck investigating.

Noibu allows developers to perform individual session searches, though, so you can work backwards to tie the error to the support request without hours of digging. This way, you can quickly pinpoint what went wrong with a minified stack trace or last reproduction step (that is automatically captured and displayed), watch the customer effects, and deploy a solution without the frustration of being given a request with no direction.
_{*a recording of the error captured in real time}

TLDR; Eliminate the frustration associated with customer tickets and support’s fix requests by having all necessary contextual data ready to go and easily findable.

Understanding, Handling, and Resolving Errors

Noibu categorizes errors into two types: JavaScript and HTTP errors.

How these errors manifest and how they get resolved are ultimately very different from each other, but the process of finding, understanding, and handling them have a fair amount of overlap.

To use a weird analogy… We can liken the typical bug remediation workflow to being a detective tasked with solving a crime. You’re told there’s been a crime, and that the crime happened somewhere in a mansion.

You have a bit of data there; you know something went wrong and you know the general vicinity where it took place (think: an error occurred, it happened on your website). It’s definitely a starting point, but you don’t really know where to start investigating.

The task of having to go through the mansion floor by floor, room by room, unsure of what exactly it is you’re looking for… that’s pretty daunting, right?

Worse, it’s time consuming. And yes, even worse than that, while you’re spending time looking in the wrong places, the culprit is still on the loose and able to do more damage.

Noibu – the reliable Watson to your Sherlock – can get you off to a much better start. Rather than being prompted with, “a crime in a mansion,” you get, “The groundskeeper was murdered in the study with a knife.”

As one of our own developers said, “We’re serving you the body. We can’t tell you why they were killed, but here are the tools you need to find that answer and get justice, a lot quicker than you would have been able to before.”

But what does this Noibu workflow look like when actually applied in your team?

New Way of Handling JavaScript Errors

After using the prioritization feature and selecting an error to begin working on, developers can navigate over to the Developer Tab. Here, you will see the error signature, the error message displayed, and the stack trace associated with the bug.

Essentially, it’s all the data you would get from rounds of reproducing the error manually.

If there is a stack trace available, developers can open the trace and see that Noibu has already highlighted the line of code that is responsible for the bug, so you can immediately focus your efforts there.

Comparing the error signature to the line that is highlighted can give a good developer a solid idea as to what caused the bug, without needing to do much other detective work.

TLDR;
The stack trace associated with the error? Captured.
The line of code that is causing the error to be thrown? Highlighted.
The devices, operating systems, pages, browsers the error is occurring on? Gathered.
All the data that the hours-long replication workflow would typically surface? Ready and waiting.

The New Way of Handling HTTP Errors

HTTP errors are a bit more nuanced than JavaScript errors, so we’ll keep the workflow overview general.
_{If you’d like to see how the console handles specific HTTP error codes, send us a quick message at info@noibu.com and we’d be happy to show you.}

After determining the priority of an HTTP error fix by using conversion and revenue impact metrics, developers can dive into the error report and head to the Developer Tab.

As with JavaScript errors, you can see the error signature, error details, the error url, the last reproduction steps, the overall user impact, session recordings, and most importantly, the error symptoms.

To identify what action spurred the HTTP error, developers can go into Session playback and get an itemized, timestamped list of every action that took place during that session with the specific root cause highlighted. Using the timestamp and the HTTP error details, you can go into your service logs and look for calls and failures that also occurred during that exact timestamp.

TLDR; Quickly identify what actions are causing an HTTP error to be thrown, the resulting symptoms of the error, and snag the exact timestamp to investigate in your service or cloud logs.

Clearing The Department’s Name

Everyone is quick to point fingers at the developers when an error is detected. And sure, code mistakes happen from time to time (as they do in every other department), but we’re of a mindset that developers aren’t the culprit of site errors, they are the ones that fix them.

We actually have a piece on why we adamantly believe that developers can and should be seen as the heroes when it comes to site errors, rather than the villains.

That all being said…

In the eyes of the support and product teams, one can understand why they would be frustrated: developers are supposed to build and maintain the site, why are the support staff the ones alerting them when something is broken. It can be frustrating to constantly have to ask the development team to fix site errors.

What if, instead of waiting to get requests (with limited contextual data, too!), your developers could reduce inter-team friction by proactively gathering lists of live errors and solving them before anyone has a chance to complain. When the end of the sprint comes around, the development team can instead boast about all the things they fixed for the website without being prompted.

With Noibu, developers only need to log into the console to immediately see all live site errors currently plaguing the website. From there, they can easily pinpoint the errors with the largest business impact, figure out what the customer experience of any error looks like, and begin resolving them… Again, all without needing to interact with the support team.

TDLR; By proactively resolving errors, you can transition your development team from being viewed as the source of the problem, to the centre of excellence.

And More!

Our own engineers are always hard at work developing new features to help eCommerce teams do their job more efficiently.

Some things already launched or getting ready for production:

– The Noibu SDK
– Source Maps (in BETA)
– Issue Tables

What are Other Developers Thinking?

A brand talking about how amazing their product is won’t carry as much weight as hearing directly from customers. So don’t just take our word for it!

Here’s how a few of our current customers’ development teams are liking the software.

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Noibu has exceeded Joe Browns’ expectations in terms of implementation with both their internal and external developers. […]
“The developers are happier because ultimately they are doing what they like doing, which is the development side of things and not necessarily the replication of bugs.”  – Joe Browns Case Study

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He measured his success with the product based on how much he now interacts with the customer service team. Previously, he would receive 5 to 6 complaints a day and now he receives 1 every couple of weeks. […]
The reduced man-power was also critical for Scrubs and Beyond. “We could have easily hired someone full time to do what I was doing before because it was so time consuming. Now I am able to put my time elsewhere because Noibu will do the job for me.”  – Scrubs and Beyond Case Study

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With Noibu in place and integrated into the development and QA processes, Princess Auto can accurately quantify the cost of bug fixes using a metrics-based approach. They are no longer using a subjective approach where their prioritization is driven by the opinions of multiple team members. […]
“Now when someone opens the hood and takes a look at our system, they see all the issues right there,” said David Matthes, Imagination Leader at Princess Auto. “We now have the ability to collect the analytics around why a repeatable problem is going on and how to fix it.” – Princess Auto Case Study

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Dan explained that “We were just kind of relying on customers contacting customer service and we had to try to replicate it ourselves. But we really had no real way of seeing what they were seeing.” […]
When asking Dan what he has gained from the Noibu tool, he indicated that “In terms of a development experience, I would go as far as to say the tool is invaluable. It’s just an awesome tool to pinpoint what’s going on.” – Ruroc Case Study

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Besides the great financial benefits Ego has seen, Hussain explained that Noibu’s largest benefit was that Noibu, “Saved both my hours and the developer’s hours.” – Ego Case Study

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Matthew Lawson, Chief Digital Officer at Ribble Cycles, saw that Noibu would allow his developers to work smarter with the time they had. Noibu’s platform would not only give the developers the ability to self-prioritize, but the team would also have all of the information available to them to resolve an issue. – Ribble Cycles Case Study

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TLDR; Customers think Noibu rocks. It saves developers time, allows teams to be more data-driven, and provides all the data developers could need when addressing site bugs.

Interested in learning more about how Noibu can help your teams? Send us a message at info@noibu.com and we’ll get in touch.

As a digital agency looking to bring in more revenue, you either have to look to bring on new clients, increase your existing contract values, or expand on current client projects.

Getting new clients is a lot easier said than done.

Increasing your price per hour in your contracts will upset your current clients.

Expanding on your current relationships is going to bring in the most results in the quickest amount of time with the least amount of effort. Bringing the Noibu software on helps agencies get there, while giving them an additional competitive advantage.

But how?

Providing Additional Insight to Clients

Unlike Application Performance Monitoring or Digital Experience tools, Noibu goes beyond heatmaps and error rate tracking. Monitoring the entirety of your eCommerce store and automatically detecting and capturing all front and back end errors, users are able to get a full 360 degree view of issues on their website.

Having this capability embedded as an offering in your services can give you an additional edge over your competitors and bring in new clients in the future.

Now, this aspect doesn’t necessarily tie into immediately expanding upon existing relationships. It does, however, tie into the next aspect which will bring in more money through your current relationships.

Consistently Refilling Your Project Queue

Typically, digital agencies are brought on with a company to complete a single “big project” or to focus on maintaining the website and digital experience.

After that big project wraps up though, how often is your team being taped on the shoulder for other projects?

When the partnership is mainly for maintenance, how often is your team requested to fix something? And when your team is called upon, how often are those “you need to fix x, y, and z” conversations underlined with friction and frustration? How many hours do these one-off maintenance tasks typically take?

With an automated and holistic view of all site issues, instead of waiting for their client to come back sporadically with quick project requests, your team can proactively approach their clients with lists of potential improvement projects that can be used to build up a continual backlog of work.

Every time there is a lull in projects between your teams and your clients, your agents can jump into the console to find more site projects to work on to get more billable hours in the bank. All while providing continual value to your client companies.

Creating an Embedded Workflow

eCommerce and Product teams have limited visibility into site errors and the support team is fielding customer tickets with limited data. When an error is brought to the team’s attention, they have to pass along fix requests to their internal development team, who then need to run through multiple reproduction and revalidation steps to find the root cause and work out a resolution. If the team is interested in seeing how much revenue the fix saved, they need to involve their RevOps and Data Scientists, too.

By partnering with a digital agency that employs Noibu, a company’s workflow can look a lot different… and save the brand tens and hundreds of hours.

Instead of going through everything stated above, clients can essentially sit back and know that errors are being proactively fixed… And if they ever question how much revenue your agency is saving them through these projects, your agents just need to dive into the console to pull the calculated revenue impact metric associated with every error they have closed-fixed.

Not only that, but when the support team does get a customer ticket about an error, they only need to forward it off to their agency team. No need to further dive into anything or worry about the amount of work they’re creating for their own developers.

So essentially, their workflow goes from irregular error notifications that require hours of development time, as we see below:

To an easy, streamlined method to deal with front and back end errors:

By not only eliminating hours of repetitive work for their team, but also directly tying revenue-saving projects to this new collaborative workflow, you make it a tall order for any company to churn away.

Put simply, if a company is able to find a partner that saves them time and saves them money… Why would they risk losing that?

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We’ve spoken about how your agency can embed itself into your client’s workflows with the help of Noibu’s software, making it incredibly difficult to churn away down the road and thus ensuring a higher retention rate and lifetime value (LTV).

We’ve also touched on how your agents can consistently fill their backlog with billable projects using the automated error detection functionality, while also using the revenue impact metric to continually prove out a good return on investment for your eCommerce clients. (So you’re not seen as a cost centre but rather a revenue generator)

Those are just two of the ways Noibu brings value to agencies, though… What about on the client side?

To get a better idea of how your potential clients receive a Noibu x Digital Agency partnership, we surveyed our customers that have worked with agencies in the past. Here are some of the takeaways uncovered:

Interested in learning more about how agencies and Noibu can work together? Send our VP of Partnerships a message on LinkedIn or via email at jared.hellman@noibu.com

“Error Detection and Revenue Recovery” sounds nice… But how do the functionalities associated with those terms actually work to solve today’s challenges? Hopefully this piece will give you a good idea of the most common challenges eCommerce brands face that Noibu’s software can solve.

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First, before we go over the challenges one-by-one, let me give you the world’s quickest product overview:

Noibu grabs all the errors on your eCommerce site that happen to real customers. We rank them by how much they hurt revenue, then produce all the information your development team needs to resolve the errors.

So that’s the general spiel. Now let’s break down how those functionalities work to solve the challenges you’re facing today.

Jump to a challenge:

1. The Support Ticket Challenge

2. The Visibility Challenge

3. The Support to Engineering Handoff Challenge

4. The Root Cause Analysis Challenge

5. The Prioritization Challenge

6. The Reproduction Workflow Challenge

7. The Conversion Rate Optimization Challenge

8. The Brand Challenge

1. The support ticket challenge

How often is your support team getting tickets submitted that say something along the lines of, “What the heck?! I’ve been trying to buy something from your site but it keeps breaking!”

That’s not a lot of information to work with, right?

Even if your team gets a ticket that has a bit more information, such as “a product page wasn’t loading,” or, “I can’t input my shipping details,” your team is still missing critical information that would allow them to identify the root cause of the problem. (Think: what browser, what device, which product or item, what mode of payment, what time, what user flow was this particular customer using?)

Unless your potential customers are naturally tech savvy and know exactly the information to include in a support ticket (*most folks don’t), more often than not your support team is going to be stuck knowing there’s an issue but not know where, how, or why. Their options are to spend the next few hours looking into the issue to hopefully identify what occurred, pass the vague message off to the engineering team to figure out, or just ignore it altogether.

Noibu allows support teams to dive into the console to pinpoint any error based on (even vague) identifiable markers included in tickets, view full session recordings, see the level of impact to business revenue the error is causing so the team can better understand which fixes need to be prioritized, and pull the entire stack trace associated with an error so they or the engineering team can immediately get to resolving the issue without losing hours trying to find the issue.

2. The visibility challenge

Did you know that only 10% of customers take the time to submit a support ticket when something breaks during their online experience?

With that in mind, your support tickets will realistically cover only a small portion of usability issues. The rest are left to be picked up by an error monitoring software or are simply left in the dark.

While other softwares focus on the “users impacted” portion of an error and highlight only the bugs that are widespread on your site, Noibu brings on another layer of analytics that takes things a step further.

Noibu’s software monitors all errors, at all times, throughout your site. Regardless of how widespread a bug is, the error will be recorded and its impact to revenue calculated.

While “users impacted” is certainly a legitimate concern and is a decent way to know which errors are more pressing, the ultimate goal of the users impacted metric is to estimate the truly meaningful hit to the business: loss of revenue due to said error.

Noibu gets you that, and more…

3. The support to engineering handoff challenge

Engineers are the backbone of eCommerce stores, and ensuring they can do their job as efficiently and effectively as possible should always be a priority.

As mentioned previously with the support ticket challenge, handing off vague requests for resolutions with limited contextual data off to the engineering team can sour the relationship between support and engineering.

With no additional data besides, “Something is broken on the website, can you fix it?” engineers have to sink a lot of behind-the-scenes work into identifying what went wrong, how it went wrong, and what is needed to resolve it.

With Noibu packaging up everything engineers need to know to kick-off their resolution process, support’s emails no longer have to be received with dread by the development team.

4. The root cause analysis challenge

With thousands of applications, softwares, and devices used to run your eCommerce store, it can be a next to impossible task to find out the exact root cause of any one error once detected.

Noibu’s software picks up on that, and displays the root cause to your developers (along with everything else they need, including full session replay and stack traces) on a silver platter, simple as that.

5. The prioritization challenge

AKA The data-driven vs subjective prioritization challenge

Imagine: The CEO’s husband is trying to order something from the online store and experiences a site bug. He tells his partner and they call up their Director of Development to say x, y, z is broken on the site and needs fixing ASAP. The engineering team spends a few hours trying to recreate the issue then work to come up with a resolution.

Conversely, there’s an error that has been detected by a software, but it isn’t really widespread and there’s a new project planned for the development sprint, so the issue is put on the backlog to be dealt with later.

At face value, it’s obvious that the company should work on the error that the CEO’s husband experienced. But how do you know whether or not the error was actually impactful to the business?

The issue is, when there isn’t any data to back up a decision, you’re stuck relying on gut-feel and seniority to determine what’s important and what gets fixed when… And without the proper data, you could be prioritizing superficial fixes and de-prioritizing fixes with a large impact to the business.

As being data-driven is at the forefront of every smart business-leader’s mind, it only makes sense to arm yourself with as much relevant data as you can. Noibu is the only detection software that provides users with revenue impact data – which is ultimately the most important metric when it comes to an eCommerce business.

This additional piece of data allows Noibu users to make objective decisions based solely on hard revenue numbers, without being clouded by outside pressures.

6. The reproduction workflow challenge

It is estimated that anywhere between 35% to 50% of a developers’ time is spent on debugging and validation efforts.

“The cost of debugging, testing, and verification is estimated to account for 50-75 percent of the total budget of software development projects, amounting to more than $100 billion annually.”

Devon H. O’Dell

When your development team gets an error ticket from the support team, what does their workflow look like? How many rounds of reproduction does the team need to go through before they can validate an error and tackle a resolution?

The typical error reproduction process looks very similar to this chart below:

So, if at any one of those steps, someone is unable to fully reproduce the error, it’s thrown into the backlog. There are 2 major problems with this.

First, how many hours did it take to get to that failure point? How much time did your developers use trying and retrying to see the reported error in “real time”?
_{*For context: In a survey of 900+ developers, researchers found that 32% of developers spend up to 10hr/wk, and 16% say they spend 15hr/wk, on bug fixes instead of writing code.}

Second, just because the team failed to replicate the error properly once, doesn’t mean the error isn’t valid or doesn’t have a real, ongoing impact to the business.

Bringing on Noibu, your team can immediately cut out this key bottleneck in their everyday workflow.

Because of how the Noibu tag captures errors, there is no longer a need to reproduce and reaffirm site bugs. Everything needed to validate, view in “real-time”*, and analyze for root cause is captured and packaged together within the console under the error signature.
_{*view a recording caught of the error happening to a real customer in real time}

All in all, taking the process from what we see above, to the streamlined workflow down below:

7. The conversion rate optimization challenge

If something fails in your backend, if there’s a new bug introduced into your system, if a <div> tag is missing, if JavaScript has failed, or any number of other instances occur, it can affect your website in a handful of different ways.

A system’s failure or an integration bug can alter the way images load on your website, can move around assets in unprecedented ways, can create blank pop-ups, or can null-ify clicks and button responsiveness.

Any of those have a direct impact on page conversion rates… Be it because the conversion action won’t load and the goal tag can’t fire, because there is now too much un-structured noise on the page that the ultimate CTA is no longer a main focus, or because the error causes such frustration that prospects leave the page.

Having Noibu in place to pick up on all errors, teams concerned with UX and conversion optimization can quickly jump into the console to ensure there are no issues blocking prospects from completing their conversion actions, and can know that they will be alerted to any outside changes that have had an adverse affect on their pages.

8. The brand challenge

You have a bad experience, you tell 10 people. You can also post about it publicly to spread the word.

It’s not uncommon now for people, instead of submitting support tickets (as mentioned above), to take to social media to complain about broken eCommerce flows. Some folks are understanding about it…

Others? Not so much…

It’s pretty safe to assume that a good portion of the frustrated customers that couldn’t complete their purchases are a lot less likely to come back to the same site to buy more.

And the thing is, unlike a support ticket, other potential customers are also seeing the public complaints on social media. And that doesn’t really build a lot of confidence, does it?

So not only has the brand lost that sale with that one customer, but they’ve also lost future sales from them and from those that have seen the complaint!

Noibu works to solve this challenge by enabling your teams to have a full view into all site errors, so they can be proactive with fixes before it starts affecting customers’ opinions of your brand.

Summary

So that’s a relatively quick look at how Noibu helps eCommerce brands recover potentially lost revenue, streamline engineer workflows, increase conversions, decrease customer churn, improve the support and engineering teams’ relationship, save time, gain visbility into site health, and become more data-driven.

Interested in how this all works, and how you can get it to work for you? You can request a short demo with one of our eCommerce experts, or send us a note at info@noibu.com.

Let’s get right down to it. Site errors, regardless of whether or not you’re in the eCommerce space, happen for a number of reasons.

You know the classics: user error and poorly written developer code.

But there’s actually another massive avenue for errors to be introduced into your flow, and it’s one that could end up being quite costly.

These errors are also not your developer’s fault…

To figure out how these “other errors” come to be, we have to take a look at how organizations run and release updates.

It’s all in the updates

I know updates happen. You know updates happen.

Your marketers know updates happen. Your engineers know updates happen.

When your company is releasing or updating something new to the site, your team is going to be looking for code regressions and error rates to identify any code or functionality issues. They’ll be keeping an eye on the APM traces to detect any major disruption in their eCommerce service.

Question is, though… Is your team going to be doing that every time a software in their stack updates?

The answer is almost always going to be, “No.”

At best, the answer would be, “Not proactively.”

Both are totally fair answers; no development team has the time (or the ability) to know what is going on behind the scenes of all of the software entities the entire company is using. It would be absolutely ludicrous to expect that.

But that’s certainly not stopping those service and software companies from releasing their own updates, whenever they so choose.

What happens when a third party updates their software?

As I mentioned above, you’re not the only one doing releases or updates… Your entire tech stack is also constantly working to bring new features to light.

And do you think the team at PayPal is going to individually QA the update’s functionality on all of their customers’ unique sites?

No.

What about WooCommerce? Are they going to dedicate hours to test out every single user flow on every single eCommerce site that uses their software?

Also no.

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* There’s an estimated 12-24 million eCommerce retailers currently on the web, and each one has unique products, individual offers, specific campaigns, different automations that make their sites their own… So checking compatibility with all these aspects, and with all the other third party softwares that are involved in powering any portion of a site’s functionality or any individual users’ technology, is an impossible feat.

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So the onus falls on your team to hear about new updates, learn what’s changed, see how those changes are interacting with your site infrastructure and users, and figure out the root cause for anything breaking. That’s assuming you have someone on hand to do this 24/7.

And to call a spade a spade, your executives probably want your developers to be focusing on new innovations for the company, rather than sitting and waiting around for new innovations from other companies to come and mess something up.

What are the root causes for these unknown update errors?

There is quite a wide range of possible root causes for these errors…

Incompatible code and incongruent API calls, cross browser or device UX issues pushing critical content outside of the viewable window, infinite loads with no answer or direction at the end, the list goes on.

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* Here is a pretty simple, and widely applicable, example of how a third party update may cause errors to occur, specifically, how something as small as adding an additional number to a version name could unknowingly break your site: Google Chrome 100 update may break your website.

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Either way, there is a large chance that something small may break – independent of work that your engineers and developers are doing – that ultimately goes unreported for days, weeks, months because it only occurs to a select few individuals who are using an untested or niche method to navigate to and around your eCommerce site.

And unfortunately, these errors can add up if left unchecked. We see this happen time and time again due to the focus on ongoing code health taking a back seat post-site release.

Additionally, with only 10% of consumers creating support tickets when they encounter a bug online, it’s easy to see how those net-new third party errors come in under the radar and stay there.

So what?

Errors are going to come in no matter what.

When you know about them, how you know about them, and what you do about them is what is in your control.

You have a few options available to you that technically monitor for site errors and will let you know when an egregious issue starts to occur to a large portion of leads… But if you’re serious about being data-driven and efficient in any of your approaches, there’s some critical data that is missing from those tools. And it has everything to do with revenue prioritization.

To learn more about why some monitoring tools simply aren’t enough, check out this piece on eliminating tech debt and going beyond the classic APM softwares.