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Posted on July 31, 2024

E-commerce wouldn’t exist without technology, but is it always a good thing to use the next new thing? In the newest episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives, host Kailin Noivo sits down with Jonathan Cleaver, Chief Technology Officer at SportsShoes.com. Together, they explore making data-driven decisions, particularly in an age where it is hard to ensure accuracy of data, as well as how CTOs can take a commercially oriented approach to their role.

Making Data-Informed Decisions

In the past 18 months, Jonathan and his team have delivered a new website for SportsShoes.com, distilling the previous website’s data to prioritize the MVP requirements. For this, they analyzed user data to prioritize the features and payment methods actually used in customer transactions.

“I try to analyze that user centric data that becomes even more important because obviously, as you get into a project, you don’t know what you don’t know, and then time soon starts to disappear on you.“ To prevent issues with the roll out, they began by making changes to local sites which required fewer features, starting with the Spanish store.

They also used tools like Hotjar, Amazon CloudWatch, and user surveys to monitor and improve the new site in real time.

Ensuring Data Reliability

Recent privacy laws, including cookie consent laws, and updates to Google Analytics now mean that 30% of site traffic is anonymous, making it harder to ensure data is accurate and reliable.

Jonathan has found that Google Analytics 4 has issues with data sampling, showing inconsistencies with previous data, making year-on-year comparisons difficult. To mitigate this, he instead relies on data from Cloud watch, capturing every event on their website and middleware. This data is monitored and recorded, using important metrics to create alerts and dashboards as part of an ongoing process to maintain data reliability.

“We really believe in capturing every single event that happens on our website. That goes for our middleware. All that is monitored. All that’s recorded and the important things are then put into our dashboards.”

The Importance of Technology

Technology is foundational for e-commerce operations, you cannot have e-commerce without it.

Jonathan admires the ways the industry pushes for competitive advantages, which technology can help with, but also hinder, depending on how it is managed. To balance innovation and durability/stability, Jonathan recommends taking calculated risks with manageable consequences, using monitoring tools to identify and address issues as they arise.

One of his biggest rules is to avoid deploying major updates on Fridays so as to mitigate risks.

Jon Cleaver on the importance of technology in e-commerce

KPIs That CTOs Should Track

Jon Cleaver on KPIs for CTOs

Jonathan’s main KPI focus is general trading KPIs. These include on-site conversion, checkout funnel conversion, year-on-year revenue, and session data. He also looks at site performance statistics, such as load times, but this is primarily when issues arise.

This approach helps him and his team maintain practical technology strategies, rather than using technology for technology’s sake. It also allows him to engage in discussions with the financial director and other board members to refine sales forecasts, particularly in consideration of how new technologies may impact them.

Listen to the Full Episode Below!

Listen to this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives with Jonathan Cleaver and Kailin Noivo to learn more about a CTO’s role in e-commerce.

👉 Apple: https://apple.co/4d6NRmq

👉 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3LO1fQm

Posted on July 29, 2024

Established as a leading enterprise e-commerce platform, BigCommerce is a modern SaaS provider that allows retail brands to create robust and unique online experiences without compromising on security, stability, or scalability.

However, due to the wide range of customizations, integrations, and features it offers, no e-commerce platform that promises this level of flexibility and control over online experiences can be immune to technical errors. That’s where Noibu comes in.

With Noibu as its health and performance monitoring co-pilot, BigCommerce can empower customers with a one-click integration to deliver frictionless shopper experiences by addressing revenue-impacting website bugs with unparalleled efficiency.

With that said, we’re thrilled to announce BigCommerce’s partnership with Noibu. This collaboration empowers BigCommerce merchants to leverage Noibu’s powerful error monitoring capabilities. By integrating Noibu with their stores, brands can gain valuable insights to detect and resolve bugs quickly and efficiently, ensuring a smooth shopping experience for their customers.

What Does this Partnership Mean for BigCommerce?

Apart from being a go-to error monitoring and performance platform for online brands, Noibu is also actively working with BigCommerce’s development team to address any platform-level bugs that may be affecting multiple websites they power.

With Noibu deployed on the BigCommerce backend, we are able to eliminate many customer-affecting errors to enhance the overall performance of the platform and improve the quality of solutions and services it provides.

To better understand and unpack this impact, let’s take a look at a couple of platform-level errors that Noibu helped BigCommerce’s development team detect and resolve:

Revenue-impacting Errors Detected by Noibu Across BigCommerce Domains

Below are two critical errors that Noibu detected on the BigCommerce platform that had been impacting shopper experiences and potentially affecting conversions as well.

Let’s break down these errors, their causes, and their impact:

Error #1: Page Already Has an Active Payment Session (Apple Pay)

What is the error about?

One of the most commonly occurring third-party errors, this bug is encountered when users try to complete a purchase and pay using Apple Pay. The error message they receive is, “Page already has an active payment session.” This prevents them from proceeding to the next step of the checkout process.

Apple Pay Checkout Error

Why is this error caused?

The error suggests that the site is trying to start a new payment process while there is one already in progress. Probable causes include issues with how the website manages payment sessions or a user action that unintentionally triggers multiple payment sessions.

What is the impact of this error?

As you might have already guessed, this checkout error can directly impact conversion rates as shoppers trying to complete a purchase via Apple Pay might end up being endlessly stuck at this stage.

That resulted in a significant number of e-commerce experiences being disrupted by the error. Not only was this error detected by Noibu, but our platform also helped the BigCommerce team immediately implement the fix to prevent it from disrupting user experiences further.

Noibu session replays

Error #2: Address ID <address ID> Does Not Exist

What is the error about?

This error occurs when users enter specific addresses in the checkout form to complete their purchase. They end up receiving the error message “Address id <address id> does not exist,” preventing them from progressing to the next stage of the process, likely causing frustration and potentially abandonment.

Why is this error caused?

This error message suggests that the site cannot find a specific address ID, without which it is unable to proceed. This could be due to a mismatch or absence of address information in the database or an issue with how the system accepts and validates addresses during checkout.

What is the impact of this error?

Commonly affecting users across devices and browsers, with a high occurrence on iPhones using Safari and Windows 10 using Chrome, this error impacts the user at the very last stage of checkout, leading directly to lost sales and buyer frustration.

Noibu found the above error occurs fairly commonly and can have a significant impact on businesses’ revenue.

Noibu was able to detect and help the team resolve this error to prevent any further abandonment or loss of revenue due to being stuck in the error stage.

What Lies Ahead For BigCommerce and Noibu?

Our nascent partnership with BigCommerce over the past few weeks has reinforced our belief in the vast potential that lies ahead to help e-commerce businesses deliver the best possible experiences by optimizing their error detection and resolution workflows.

We’re excited to continue working closely with the BigCommerce team to ensure its customers can rely on a robust platform that prides itself on offering high-quality website experiences.

To experience the magic of Noibu for yourself, sign up for a checkout audit and let Noibu uncover errors that could be disrupting your e-commerce experience. 

For more information on the partnership, visit the Noibu x BigCommerce FAQ.

Posted on July 29, 2024

On June 20th, 2024, we hosted our second annual Customer Meetup in New York City, where we spent the day connecting with industry experts, learning from their incredible growth journeys, and unpacking the key pillars of e-commerce success in this economy.

We took back some extremely valuable insights from our customers’ experiences in the e-commerce space. One of the standout moments of the meetup was the keynote address delivered by Brian Dhatt, CTO of BigCommerce. Drawing from his extensive experience in online retail, Brian shared insightful anecdotes from his time working with renowned brands such as PopSugar, Best Buy, and Estee Lauder.

He also discussed his professional journey that led him to his current role as the CTO of BigCommerce, highlighting the evolving e-commerce industry and the lessons he has learned along the way.

Powering global online retail behemoths around the globe, BigCommerce currently serves about 60,000 mid-market and enterprise merchants and is one of the biggest e-commerce platforms in the market.

Brian Dhatt also serves as the President of Feedonomics, a leading data feed optimization platform. In this role, he oversees the technology that enables businesses to send their product data to multiple channels, synchronize it across various systems, and optimize it to enhance sales performance.

In this blog post, we will unpack the key highlights from Brian’s keynote presentation, focusing specifically on decision theory and how you can effectively leverage it to drive e-commerce growth.

The Role of Decision Theory in E-commerce Pricing Optimization

In his keynote address, Brian empathizes that even though we’ve all been leveraging A/B testing and multivariate testing on our online stores for years now, there are some key aspects we’ve missed in our testing strategy.  

“All of us have been doing A/B tests and multivariate testing for years, usually focusing on what creative works on our homepage or how to order items. But there’s a deeper science behind decision theory that can bring new insights and ideas.”

He talks about The Economist pricing experiment by Dan Ariely – Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University.

When Dan was looking to subscribe to The Economist, he came across the following pricing options:

the decoy effect example from the economist

The Decoy Effect and its Impact on Consumer Choices

Dan was confused as to why someone would opt for the “Print Only” option at that price. He decided to run an experiment where he asked a group of people to choose between:

  • “Web only” and “Print + Web”
  • “Web Only”, “Print Only”, and “Print + Web”

In the first test, 68% of respondents chose “Web Only” and only 32% of them chose “Print + Web”. However, when presented with all three options, 84% of all respondents chose “Print + Web” and only 16% of them chose “Web Only”, while no one chose “Print Only”.

impact of the decoy effect on consumer choices

What Does This Tell Us About Buying Decisions?

Dan soon realized that the pricing structure chosen by The Economist was neither accidental nor random. It was carefully chosen by the company to play on “The Decoy Effect” which directly influences human decision-making.

In marketing terms, The Decoy Effect is a clever pricing strategy wherein one of the three options is only offered to shift consumers’ preference toward the more expensive option as it is perceived to offer asymmetrically higher value than the decoy. In this case, the “Print Only” option is the decoy that when offered as a third option, makes customers switch their preference from “Web Only” to “Print + Web”.

“Another classic example is Starbucks, which excludes the smallest, cheapest option from its menu to drive consumers toward higher-priced choices.”

How Apple Leverages the Decoy Effect to Drive Preference Toward More Expensive Products

Apple’s website today offers a puzzling choice when it comes to choosing a pair of AirPods. The leftmost option is the base model from the previous generation and knowing Apple’s users who are known to keep up with the latest gadgets launched by the brand, it’s highly unlikely that anyone chooses to buy that model.

However, does it help shift buyers’ preference towards the right? Absolutely! The cheaper, older model is presented on the website simply in order to highlight the asymmetrically higher value that the newer ones offer in comparison so that buyers are immediately inclined to opt for the latter.

Numeric vs Visual Persuasion Via The Decoy Effect

So, does The Decoy Effect have the same influence when the customer is presented with visual numeric choices?

Several studies have concluded that The Decoy Effect only comes into play when humans are presented with text and doesn’t have any influence in the case of visual options.

It’s interesting to note that despite visuals being a key factor in influencing buying decisions, especially in e-commerce, The Decoy Effect relies on text to introduce cognitive bias in the human decision-making process.

Other Pricing Theories That Influence Decision-Making and Their Practical Applications

In this address, Brian also talked about three other theories that marketers often use to optimize their pricing strategies and positively influence decisions:

Intertemporal choice: Widely used in economics, intertemporal choice refers to how current decisions impact the choices that are available in the future. This concept plays on whether someone decides to opt for delayed gratification in the hopes of a larger reward or goes for a smaller reward that is available immediately.

It is clear that consumers who opt to buy something immediately value their current interests more deeply. Therefore, e-commerce teams can utilize this theory to highlight the benefits of products right after launch to convert those buyers. However, for consumers who prefer deferring purchases to get them for a cheaper price, businesses must focus on the long-term performance of products such as after-sales protection.

Framing effect: A type of cognitive bias, the framing effect suggests that people react differently to the same piece of information depending on how it is presented to them. This can be applied to pricing, promotional messaging, product positioning, and many other e-commerce aspects.

There is a positive way and a negative way to present a message. In the case of e-commerce, for example, you can either offer an early bird discount to customers for buying a product early or use the principle of scarcity to indicate that it might not be available after a certain time frame. Both these messaging styles are likely to drive different results depending on the product, business, and target audience.

Prospect theory: Prospect theory suggests that buyers’ responses to potential losses are much greater than their responses to potential gains. One of the greatest examples of the use of the prospect theory in e-commerce is providing free shipping to customers. To avoid the financial risk of a shipping fee, buyers are likely to respond by increasing their average order value.

To understand more about how cognitive biases and decision theories impact e-commerce buyer behavior, Brian recommends reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.

Brian’s address was a goldmine of insights from his career spanning decades. He shared some incredible real-life examples that helped us understand the practical implications of decision theory.

This was just one segment of Brian’s keynote address. Follow the Noibu blog for more insights from his talk and other industry trends and updates.

Posted on July 29, 2024

As part of our second annual Customer Meetup in New York City on June 20th, 2024, we had the privilege of engaging with knowledgeable industry experts and customers who shared invaluable insights on the future of e-commerce.

Throughout the day, we explored what drives e-commerce success in 2024 and beyond, discussing how forward-thinking retailers can prepare for the next era of online shopping.

A standout moment from the event was the keynote address by Brian Dhatt, CTO of BigCommerce. He shared his career journey and the lessons he’s learned, providing a wealth of knowledge to our attendees.

In our previous post, we recapped the first segment of his keynote presentation – the role of decision theory in e-commerce pricing optimization.

In this article, we will break down the next portion of his presentation: passwordless one-click checkouts and how the 60,000 merchants using BigCommerce leverage them.

Do One-Click Passwordless Checkouts Make a Difference?

Passwordless one-click checkouts allow online shoppers to complete their purchases without logging in, creating an account, or entering a password. Retailers can integrate with payment solutions like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Stripe to offer customers a secure, single-click checkout experience.

Let’s look at some of the key advantages of using passwordless checkouts:

For Customers For Retailers
Speed and convenience of checking out in a single click Increased conversions from happier shoppers
Security and peace of mind of not sharing your data with multiple websites Reduced friction from long, complicated checkout princesses
Better shopping experience of not having to go through multiple steps Improved brand credibility by partnering with leading payment solutions

Passwordless one-click checkouts allow shoppers to complete their purchases efficiently and securely without having to remember or save passwords for every website they shop at. For retailers, the primary advantage is delivering a significantly enhanced and frictionless experience that increases the likelihood of conversions.

What Does Data Say About The Potential of Passwordless Checkouts?

As a consumer shopping online, it’s evident that passwordless one-click checkouts are faster and more convenient than searching for or recalling passwords to complete purchases. But is there credible data to support that passwordless checkouts positively impact conversion rates and purchase intent?

In his keynote address, Brian shared some encouraging insights into the potential of passwordless guest checkouts.

passwordless one-click checkouts

BigCommerce’s internal data shows that using PayPal Fastlane has:

  • Increased guest checkouts by 15%-20%
  • Improved guest consumer recognition rate by 70%
  • Reduced time to complete checkout by 39%

To put these numbers into perspective, moving your checkout conversion rate by even a small margin can be a significant achievement. Therefore, if deploying passwordless checkouts helps improve conversion by upwards of 15%, it’s a worthwhile investment.

Not only do passwordless checkouts boost conversions and consumer recognition rates, but they also decrease the overall time taken to complete the process by almost 40%. In a world of diminishing consumer attention spans, a 40% reduction in time-to-checkout is invaluable.

Which Passwordless Checkout Options Should You Offer?

According to Brian’s experience at BigCommerce, the three most trusted and deployed passwordless solutions are:

  • Fastlane by PayPal (500 mn+ accounts)
  • Link by Stripe (300mn+ accounts)
  • Shop Pay (100 mn+ accounts
passwordless one-click checkout options

Do You Get Access to Consumer Data with Passwordless Checkouts?

Many retailers are concerned about losing valuable consumer data when deploying passwordless guest checkouts. Brian clarified that the best part about these solutions is their easy integration with checkout systems. Even if users choose the passwordless checkout option, retailers won’t lose out on consumer data. Buyer information can still be captured and used for marketing purposes later, regardless of whether they opt for passwordless checkout.

Brian strongly recommends investing in passwordless checkouts, and the data and examples he shared from BigCommerce speak for themselves. For retailers, passwordless checkouts are a path to boosting conversions, fostering loyalty, and delivering a delightful checkout experience that keeps customers returning to your online store.

This is just one segment of Brian’s keynote address. Follow the Noibu blog for more insights from his talk and other industry trends and updates.

Posted on July 29, 2024

A few weeks ago, we hosted our second annual Customer Meetup in New York City, where we had the honor of connecting and brainstorming with knowledgeable industry experts and our customers on various topics surrounding e-commerce success.

A key moment from the event was the keynote address by Brian Dhatt, CTO of BigCommerce. He walked us through his career journey and extensive experience in online retail, highlighting the evolving industry trends that retailers need to keep up with.

In our previous posts, we discussed the first two segments of his presentation—the role of decision theory in e-commerce pricing optimization and the potential of passwordless one-click checkouts.

In this post, we will break down his thoughts and insights on the last segment of his address – the growing importance of LLMs (such as ChatGPT) in content discovery.

The Impact of LLMs on Online Shopping Behavior

LLMs, or large language models, comprehend and process vast amounts of information to generate human-like text. ChatGPT is an AI-powered LLM that understands data to have human-like conversations and make predictions.

In e-commerce, LLMs enhance customer support, automate content creation (such as writing product descriptions), and aid product discovery. Brian emphasizes that GPTs might sound complicated but at the very basic level, they have a statistical model for predicting the next word in a customer query. Take the following example:

optimizing content for large language models

In the above example, the model has predicted that there is a 97% chance that the next word in the sentence – “cat sat on a..” is mat. Essentially, GPTs build a statistical model that excels at deducing the next word in a search query based on context.

Understanding Temperature in GPTs

To ensure data freshness, real-time access, and high ranking, OpenAI has begun licensing data, including a partnership with Stack Overflow and Reddit. This means OpenAI uses these platforms’ real-time data to enhance its ability to answer questions accurately.

How does ChatGPT get the data it needs?

To ensure data freshness, real-time access, and high ranking, OpenAI has now begun licensing their data including a partnership with Stack Overflow and Reddit. This means that OpenAI will now use Stack Overflow and Reddit’s suite of tools to enhance its ability to answer questions using these platforms’ real-time data.

Optimizing Content for Large Language Models (LLMs)

In a world that is now ruled by ChatGPT, Brian recommends investing heavily in optimizing your e-commerce content for LLMs, just like we all once did for SEO. Here are some tips here shared:

  • Prioritize websites that are known to be scraped by LLMs
  • Ensure product descriptions are clear, concise, and informative
  • Include relevant keywords in titles and throughout the content
  • Use structured data to help LLMs understand content
  • Monitor LLM performance to identify areas for improvement

Brian recommends moving away from a keyword-first approach to more of a question-answer format and relying on more structured/hierarchical data to get your content captured by LLMs.

It’s almost important to note that LLMs update their models once every few months, so it can take a while to see the intended results. Therefore, Brian suggests investing early and monitoring the results regularly over long periods of time to seed your data into various LLMs. The first mover advantage that you can get is similar to the early days of SEO where companies that invested early on could reserve a spot on the first page of Google.

Brian shared some actionable and invaluable insights as part of his keynote presentation. This was just one segment of Brian’s keynote address. Follow the Noibu blog for more insights from his talk and other industry trends and updates.

Posted on July 29, 2024

Code freezes are a critical practice for developers, particularly during periods of high-anticipated traffic. By halting changes or updates to the website, developers aim to ensure stability during these peak times.

Particularly in the context of e-commerce, the most common code freeze is during the holiday season. To ensure the user experience doesn’t get negatively impacted or no accidental hiccups are introduced in the shopper journey, developers refrain from pushing any new code live during this time when businesses witness high volumes of traffic.

While a code freeze can act as a safety net, it doesn’t guarantee a 100% error-free site, especially when traffic volumes surge beyond usual levels.

Here are some best practices to ensure your code freeze is implemented successfully:

Code Freeze Best Practices

Start planning ahead of time to complete high-priority projects before the freeze

Jumping into a code freeze without preparation is a recipe for disaster. Begin planning well in advance to wrap up high-priority launches before the freeze. Use time as your competitive advantage to leave your website in its most stable state. Create a workback schedule to complete crucial projects early and deprioritize less important tasks until after the holiday season.

Leverage the downtime to uncover opportunities for optimization

Use the code freeze period to identify long-term improvement opportunities. Audit your backlog and prioritize strategic projects for after the peak season. Brainstorm ways to optimize site performance, better utilize your tech stack, streamline processes, and tackle low-priority projects that have been on hold.

Continue to monitor your site for any errors that may pop up

A common misconception is that a code freeze makes your site immune to bugs or glitches. While it prevents new errors caused by updates or releases, it doesn’t protect against existing issues. Continuous monitoring for errors that might affect the customer journey is essential even during a code freeze.

The State of Website Errors During a Code Freeze

The holiday season is the busiest time of the year, and eliminating friction from the customer journey is crucial. At Noibu, we help our customers leverage our platform during a code freeze to stay ahead of technical errors, customer complaints, and recurring issues, ensuring a delightful shopping experience. Here’s how Noibu can help during a code freeze:

Level Up Your Customer Support

During the holiday season, higher traffic can lead to more customer complaints and inquiries. Use Noibu’s session tracking as a diagnostic tool for your support team. Investigate complaints quickly by finding a user’s session in Noibu to determine if there’s a legitimate bug or if it’s an issue on the customer’s end.

Provide your support team with direct access to Noibu or set up a process for relaying this information to the technical team.

Noibu sessions overview

To streamline this process further and make it easier to find a specific user session, ask the customer to generate a Help Code. This gives your developers a numerical code to quickly retrieve the problematic session.

To find a specific session without the help code, you’ll need to filter the list of sessions by details specific to the customer’s experience. Noibu also has a software development kit (SDK) that lets you set custom attributes, like a customer ID or order ID to more easily search through sessions.

Get Ahead with QA

Even if new code isn’t deployed to your live site, you can still push updates to your staging domain. Use Noibu on your staging domain to uncover and resolve bugs before they reach production.

Setting up a staging domain in Noibu is straightforward and free. Utilize this time to double down on QA and ensure that live site changes are error-free.

Audit Your Backlog of Issues

A code freeze is a great time to review your issues dashboard in Noibu to ensure everything is marked in the right state. Check if issues marked as Open or In-Progress have been resolved or need to be marked as Closed-Fixed.

If any issues marked as Closed-Fixed are still occurring, reopen them and assign them to the development team. If any issues marked under Closed-Ignore are negatively impacting customers, consider reopening them to ensure the right fix is deployed.

Continue to Monitor Alerts for Priority Issues

Remember, a code freeze doesn’t mean errors won’t occur. Continue to monitor email alerts from Noibu and regularly check the Priority View on the Issues page.

There could always be errors that occur due to the misfiring of a third-party script or simply because of the high traffic influx. By monitoring for those alerts regularly, you can deploy fixes in real-time and prevent any major impact on customer experience or revenue.

Noibu alerts

Have a Successful Holiday Season with Noibu

The holiday season is crucial for your business. With Noibu monitoring your site, you can have peace of mind knowing a reliable system is in place, ensuring no bug goes undetected.

If you face any issues or would like to understand how you can utilize the platform better during the holiday season, please reach out to our support team at support@noibu.com.

Posted on July 24, 2024

In the newest episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives, host Kailin Noivo is joined by Tony Trew, Vice President of Marketing and E-commerce at Bouclair. Together, they explore COVID-19’s effect on the home decor industry and e-commerce KPIs, as well as how Bouclair tracks certain metrics to ensure customers have the best omnichannel experience.

COVID-19’s Impact on the Home Decor Industry

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers in the home decor space typically made large purchases, such as sofas or beds, every once in a while. The pandemic brought with it a shift to online shopping, as people were sent home. This positively affected sales in the space, as people wanted nicer spaces to spend their time in, especially given the proliferation of remote meetings.

“Home decor was affected in a very positive way during [COVID] in that people working from home suddenly realized that they’re going to be there for a while, and they might as well make their space as beautiful as possible, especially having a window into everybody else’s home a few times a day as you go into these meetings.”

This increase in demand, however, caused supply chain issues, with many companies struggling to meet their consumers’ wants and needs. Post-COVID, the demand has decreased once again, so companies are having to shift their marketing strategies to attract more customers.

The Evolution of Omnichannel E-commerce KPIs

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, VPs of E-commerce focused their KPIs around driving traffic volume. However, as consumers were forced online, they became more tech-savvy, and thus more discerning, and now the focus has shifted to increasing conversion rates.

At Bouclair, the focus is on top-of-funnel acquisition marketing, specifically new user acquisition and brand expansion beyond Quebec. To monitor this, they are measuring net new users, geographic diversity, time spent, bounce rates and user engagement, gender ratios, and how in-store conversion rates are influenced by online visitors.

Tony is skeptical about over-relying on Return on Ad Spend and traditional attribution models, instead emphasizing the importance of selecting varied KPIs to get a comprehensive understanding of the true picture of your organization.

Tony Trew on the evolution of e-commerce KPIs

Metrics to Track for your Omnichannel Strategy

Omnichannel businesses simply cannot use the same KPIs as purely e-commerce or brick and mortar brands, especially in areas that lack physical stores.

For Bouclair’s customer base, preferences have shifted across the past few years from in-store pickup to home delivery, which the company has been monitoring to ensure their flexible shipping options remain wanted by customers.

They further track e-commerce sales by geographic location to gain insights into where it may be beneficial to open new stores, as well as offering customized shipping solutions based on geographic data and customer demand.

Each week, Tony reviews geodata and conversion rates to ensure the best shipping options are available in each location that customers reside in.

Tony Trew on metrics to track for your omnichannel strategy

Listen to the Full Episode Below!

Listen to this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives with Tony Trew and Kailin Noivo to learn more about the past, present, and future of e-commerce in the home decor space.

👉 Apple: https://bit.ly/3zWRxZf
👉 Spotify: https://bit.ly/3ydENg9

Posted on July 17, 2024

E-commerce is switching to an age of composable architecture, but what are the impacts of this on the industry? In the latest episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives, host Kailin Noivo sits down with Alessandro Canessa, Head of Developer Relations at Commerce Layer. Together, they explore the business impact of micro frontends and the importance of developer advocacy and relations roles in the move away from monolithic architecture.

What is a Micro Frontend?

Micro frontends originate from the microservices concept, with the application of the single responsibility principle to frontends. Thus, ‘micro’ does not refer to a small frontend, but instead reflects their existence as an independent, releasable function.

Alessandro Canessa on what micro frontends are

They exist to eliminate monolithic frontends, again coming from their ability to be independent and releasable. They can act as an entire user journey, or just a part of it, but the underlying concept is that they can be released automatically and independently.

At Commerce Layer, they are developed using web components, React components, and hosted application abstractions so as to reduce the time to market.

They are only possible to use when you have headless architecture which provides API-based backend support. Alessandro explains, “the headless CMS is the brain of your APIs, right? So it provides all the backend. And then the frontend will be separate.”

The Business Impact of Headless Commerce and Micro Frontends

Monolithic architectures, and thus frontends, can cause business issues, such as updated difficulties and team dependencies. Fortunately, these can be solved by keeping different verticals separate, like through a headless approach.

“Now, why would a business go headless? Because you can actually end up with a micro frontend. You can work on and release those verticals while you keep working on the rest of the product, and you can release independent parts of your application without having massive dependencies across the different teams.”

Of course, going headless will not automatically fix any problems; you will still need adequate, properly constructed architecture. That being said, Alessandro explains that headless architecture, and micro frontends, allow for independent development and release of application parts, which is beneficial for enterprises as it enables incremental updates without large dependencies.

The Future of Developer Relations and Advocacy

The current composable ecosystem calls for more developer-oriented documentation and API promotion, which means developer advocacy and relations roles are becoming more prominent.

Developer advocacy is essentially public relations for developers, and helps to build a developer culture. As mini accelerators and composable architecture have increased in prominence, developer advocacy and relations roles are becoming ever more necessary. Developer relations facilitates interactions between different tech solutions, enabling an easier implementation of composable architecture for system integrators and clients. In a monolithic architecture world, it was not necessary, but it is essential in the current ecosystem with multiple platforms.

Listen to the Full Episode Below!

Listen to this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives with Alessandro Canessa and Kailin Noivo to learn more about the future of micro frontends and developer relations.

👉 Apple: https://apple.co/3zOknLd

👉 Spotify: https://bit.ly/3y2fcXu 

Posted on July 15, 2024

Driving traffic to your online store is no longer a metric for success. This is because converting visitors into buyers and eventually, loyalists is getting increasingly tougher. Most online businesses struggle with average conversion rates of 2.5-3% despite the high traffic.

Why do shoppers abandon their purchases? Is it due to poor experience or some issue they are facing? Real user monitoring allows e-commerce companies to get in-depth insights into website performance issues and user experience that impact buyer intent and conversion rates.

Real-user monitoring is a critical part of performance monitoring. It allows e-commerce teams to discover what real users are experiencing on the website and the hiccups they are facing. For instance, broken user interfaces, slow sites or servers, 404 errors, broken internal links, and more.

In this post, we will share the top benefits RUM offers to boost website performance, customer shopping journeys, and revenue.

Components of Real User Monitoring and How it Works

Real user monitoring counts on several components that work together to detect issues. The components shared in this graphic determine how RUM data is used and how it functions.

Components of real user monitoring

Data Collection

RUM uses JavaScript, log files, error logs, and load balancing to capture all the user and performance data in real time. This includes the collection of information like the page load time, user interactions, system crashes, and network issues from the browser or user’s device.

Each of these data points offers a comprehensive picture of the user experience, allowing e-commerce teams to identify issues and optimize performance.

For instance, error logs and log files offer insights into backend processes like server response time and error messages that help spot technical issues that impact user experience. Similarly, load-balancing data shows how traffic distribution affects performance across various servers.

Transmission Protocol

Transmission protocol allows the gathered data to be transferred to a centralized monitoring system. Thus, all the data is on a single platform for improved communication, visibility, coordination, and tracking, thereby enhancing the team’s ability to manage issues. This has a direct impact on the response time in case of an emergency.

Sessionization

Sessionization compiles data into records. Sessions are central to tracking what real users are experiencing. RUM heavily relies on monitoring these sessions to record actions and log the browser or device, or the specific pages where the error has occurred. It monitors problems like navigation issues, server and database errors, slow response times, and more. However, tracking a part of that user session alone will not give you the insights you need to understand what is impacting UX.

Data Storage

This comprises the infrastructure to store the data and run the root cause analysis collected from various sources.

Reporting

RUM analytics offers insightful reports in the form of graphs and charts that allow teams to make informed decisions. The analytics goes beyond parsing basic error logs. It analyzes user segments, page performance, availability, etc.

Thus, with a real user monitoring tool, you can monitor –

  • Page load times
  • Resource load times
  • Website interactions like bounce rates, number of clicks to purchase, traffic, third-party dependencies, and more
  • Form interaction
  • Errors
  • Browser and device type
  • Navigation paths

RUM differs from synthetic monitoring which relies on scripted transactions and emulated user behavior to gather data. On the other hand, RUM captures data from actual users in real time as they interact with the website.

Benefits of Real User Monitoring

RUM is beneficial because it focuses on shoppers who could be lost owing to poor user experience stemming from errors and flaws. Let’s take a deep dive into the benefits of real user monitoring.

Real-Time Visibility into the Website Performance

A simple JavaScript error is enough to hugely impact the website’s performance. Through RUM you get a viewpoint of how a user interacts with the website and spot unforeseen issues. For instance, how quickly your site’s pages load in various locations and across browser versions.

Analysis of Frontend Performance

Frontend performance analysis involves monitoring the speed of the website interface during loading and interactions. RUM allows you to focus on frontend metrics like page load times, resource loading, rendering speed, and user interactions. Thus, the team can use this data to spot optimization opportunities, enhance code quality, and boost user experience.

End-to-End Visibility of the User Journey

With such end user experience monitoring you get end-to-end visibility of the user’s journey when they interact with the website. Tracking the entire buyer lifecycle provides a comprehensive view of user behavior.

Thus, it offers detailed information on user paths, pain points, and successful interactions, allowing you to detect bottlenecks that impact UX. These insights can be leveraged to create smoother user flows and enhanced user satisfaction.

Ease of Monitoring Service Level Targets

SLAs (service-level agreements) strengthen user trust in a service. RUM can be used to monitor service level agreements to show how you are meeting your SLA. For instance, application uptime, failure rates, and more. Thus, you can exceed user expectations and improve conversion rates.

Ability to Track High-Value Pages

High-value pages like the checkout page or the sign-up page are crucial in e-commerce. Usually, the lead developer or engineer is responsible for monitoring and prioritizing these fixes. RUM allows you to discover high-value pages that need instant fixes. It offers charts and analytics while tracking the relevant real user metrics.

Improved Developer Productivity

Developers usually spend a lot of time manually spotting issues and solving them. Real user monitoring offers the development team complete visibility of issues, enabling them to prioritize time-sensitive ones impacting UX. This allows them to make data-driven decisions, ensuring faster issue resolution.

Moreover, RUM assists in resource optimization by identifying performance bottlenecks. Thus, developers can allocate resources wisely, thereby lowering infrastructure expenses related to improving code, delays due to third-party services, and server usage. All this improves developer productivity, system performance, and reliability.

How Noibu Compares to RUM Solutions

Discovering what your real users are experiencing is important. However, relying on a real user monitoring solution isn’t enough. You need a platform that’s much more than RUM. Its functionality should fill the gap in your tech stack by not just keeping your front end healthy (site stability + error-tracking) but also directly correlating the errors to the revenue impact.

RUM solutions have several limitations that Noibu overcomes:

  • They prioritize based on occurrence rates, not by impact on revenue. So, you aren’t alerted on conversion-impacting issues or sales downtimes that are effortlessly achieved with Noibu because of its automatic issue prioritization
  • They fail to offer business-level reporting. In fact, they fail to offer an easy-to-understand explanation of error codes for non-technical or business teams
  • They aren’t tailored for e-commerce operations. Unlike Noibu, they do not offer indications of checkout abandonment, issues with payment gateways, and other signs of e-commerce user frustration
  • They need additional resources to manually link customer complaint tickets to bugs, making the process time-consuming and imprecise
  • They are not prescriptive and do not provide potential fixes for bugs while Noibu goes beyond just spotting bugs. It’s a plug-and-play platform that recommends fitting fixes

How Noibu Stands Out as an End to End E-commerce Monitoring Solution

Unified monitoring across the front and back end

Traditionally, front and backend data is siloed in separate point solutions. Noibu’s unified monitoring helps in collecting and analyzing this data in a single platform.

Noibu offers automatic error detection for both JavaScript errors and server-side issues, ensuring the holistic health of your e-commerce platform. Its unified monitoring allows e-commerce developers to correlate performance metrics, traces, logs, and in real-time on a single dashboard.

Automatic issue prioritization and alerting

Noibu detects and prioritizes all website errors automatically based on their impact on revenue and conversions. It collects all data related to the issue, assigns a descriptive title and Error Signature, and provides all the necessary details your developers need to efficiently resolve errors. The platform also alerts on issue occurrences, solved issue occurrences, and the necessary technical information needed to resolve them. By relying on Noibu for error monitoring, teams have been able to reduce their error resolution time by 70%.

Issue details and explanation

Along with technical details, Noibu also provides AI-generated explanations of issues for non-technical teams so they can understand site errors better and visualize their impact.

Session replays

Noibu’s Session Playback feature recreates the shopper’s journey, offering insights into the session timeline, which documents each event throughout the session recording, including error encounters, web vital scores, page lifecycle events, user clicks, and HTTP events to help you recreate the issue and visualize the user journey for quick error resolution.

Flexible SDK

Noibu’s flexible SDK enables the creation of custom attributes like Customer ID, campaign details, logged-in status, A/B testing results, and more. Besides JS, it supports React & Vue.js SDK.

Summing Up

Common website errors and user friction can have a lasting impact on shopper trust, retention, and sales. RUM aims to offer the necessary real user monitoring data to address these issues and boost website performance.

However, when it comes to procuring a robust and tailored approach for e-commerce platforms that helps correlate site issues to revenue impact, Noibu stands out. If you are looking for a platform that understands and caters specifically to your e-commerce needs, count on Noibu. The platform serves as a co-pilot when it comes to delivering superior user experiences and boosting conversions and revenue. Sign up for a demo with our experts to see Noibu’s magic in action and instantly spot issues and prioritize them based on business impact.

Posted on July 10, 2024

Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC), the ‘growth engine for customer companies’, is committed to helping commerce companies push past the boundaries of traditional commerce, now powering commerce for over two billion shoppers worldwide, serving brands ranging from small businesses to large enterprises.

In the latest episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives, host Kailin Noivo is joined by SVP and General Manager of SFCC Michael Affronti to explore the platform’s evolution, offerings, and strategic vision.

SFCC's Strategic Vision

SFCC is committed to supporting the growth of the world’s leading commerce companies. To Michael, every company is a commerce company, so this is really an aim to be the number one platform for businesses in any industry looking to enhance their commerce tech, which is becoming increasingly more common today.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge in e-commerce as the primary mode of interaction between consumers and brands. This led to many brands going online and investing in their e-commerce infrastructure. Post-pandemic, consumer behavior and spending have somewhat normalized, prompting companies to rebalance their technology investments, which SFCC is well-placed to help with due to their flexible deployment options.

Serving the Mid-Market

Historically, SFCC has served enterprise luxury retail brands, but they are now extending into the mid-market.

Specifically, they have been focusing on companies that require multi-store, international operations, and high reliability during peak events, as SFCC is particularly strong in managing complex, multi-channel, and international operations.

Some of SFCC’s notable customers include Guess, LVMH portfolio brands, and Cartier, who have all chosen the brand due to its trustworthy, secure reputation, and its comprehensive integration with other Salesforce solutions.

The Headless Commerce Debate

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, companies sought full control over their e-commerce operations, leading to an increased demand for headless commerce solutions. The perceived growth opportunities led to overwhelming enthusiasm, but there has been a widespread realization that total ownership is costly and operationally challenging, leading to a shift in attitude.

Michael Affronti on headless commerce

To meet these changing consumer needs, SFCC has created both a robust headless offering and a composable offering to meet hybrid needs, cater to diverse customers, and facilitate an easy transition between solutions.

The Intersection of AI and Retail

The 2020s have been marked by a significant platform shift with the influx of AI, similar to the shifts we saw with the introduction of the Internet and mobile technology.

To effectively use AI in retail, Michael explains that you need a single source of truth about your customers, ideally one that is a comprehensive overview of their unique profile. SFCC can act as this, and be used in combination with AI to create hyper-personalized experiences for customers, using their preferences, past purchases, site behavior, and even similarities to other shoppers to make recommendations.

Listen to the Full Episode Below!

Listen to this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives with Michael Affronti and Kailin Noivo to discover more about SFCC’s evolution and offerings.

👉 Apple: https://apple.co/4cz9KdI

👉 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4eTMYij

Posted on July 4, 2024

Headless commerce has enabled businesses to optimize websites and applications by separating the front and back ends. APIs have made it possible to make design changes without additional back-end coding. The separate ends offer complete freedom of customization instead of relying on pre-defined formats.

No wonder, the adoption of headless commerce is on a rapid rise. The E-commerce Industry Data Book report reveals that the headless market valued at $1.32 billion in 2020 is projected to surge to $13.08 billion by 2028, at a CAGR of 30.1%.

Decoupled and service-oriented architectures stand out as a core enabler for e-commerce businesses aiming to thrive in the competitive landscape with agility, personalization, and efficiency.

In this post, we will share inspiring headless commerce examples of brands making the most of the transformative architecture.

Impact of Headless Commerce on Customer Experience and Site Performance

Don’t take our word for how headless commerce is steering digital engagement and conversions. These statistics speak loud and clear.

So, without further ado, let’s look at how these e-commerce brands are jumping on the headless bandwagon.

Examples of How Forward-Thinking Brands Leverage Headless Commerce

Koala

Koala is Australia’s favorite mattress and furniture retailer that adopted the headless approach with a set of objectives. They wanted their e-commerce platform to be modular, extensible, and based on the headless microservices architecture.

They adopted commerce tools with their API extensions, GraphQL coverage, scalability, and flexibility around the data model. The cloud-based headless commerce platform could easily fit and integrate with Koala’s infrastructure, system environments, and applications. This helped them offer world-class shopping experiences.

Koala could make rapid changes to the website with minimum downtime, improve their site’s response time, and offer tailored experience across devices. Migrating to a headless architecture put the team at Koala in charge of every aspect of the customer experience, translating into significant numbers. They grew from 371 product variants to 674 and boosted from 13 categories to 29 in less than a year. 

Headless commerce example - Koala

Target

Target is a renowned retailer that faces intense competition from behemoths like Amazon and Walmart. For this, they invested in offering an engaging and user-friendly experience across channels.

The American retail corporation was quick to realize a huge chunk of its shoppers started their purchase journey on one device and checked out on another. They figured that this would cause friction, forcing customers to abandon their shopping. They decided to unite these two experiences to help customers seamlessly transition their shopping journey without losing context or progress.

By adopting a headless architecture, Target could update and optimize its website and mobile app independently in sync with the customer’s needs. Thus, they built a unified shopping experience across various channels and devices, offering a consistent purchase flow for their customers.

This strategy not only improved the website’s conversion rate but also addressed revenue losses.

Headless commerce example - Target

Nike

As of May 2024, mobile drives the largest portion of visitors to e-commerce sites – 73%. Nike was quick to learn about this growing trend and wanted to adopt a mobile-first approach to gain more sales on mobile customers.

They planned to deliver an enhanced small-screen experience for customers using mobile devices. For instance, sharing mobile-friendly visuals and links that could effortlessly work with mobile browsing.

Going the headless CMS route allowed them to customize their mobile front end without any limitations coming from the back end. This approach set them apart from Adidas and Under Armour, their prime competitors. In fact, their D2C strategy included building a headless platform and helped Nike to hit 50% digital penetration.

Headless commerce example - Nike

Lancôme

The French luxury perfumes and cosmetics company saw huge potential in going headless. They jumped on the headless commerce bandwagon by embracing PWAs to enhance their user experience.

Lancôme wished to offer exceptional customer experience across devices and channels. Hence, they adopted the headless approach with React PWA. This technology allowed them to create an immersive mobile website functioning like a native app.

The high-end cosmetics brand can now deliver reliable performance on unstable networks and push notifications for re-engagement. Their best-in-class PWA achieves a performance score of 94/100 on Lighthouse, an automated tool for improving web page quality.

This resulted in improved website performance, reduced bounce rates, and increased mobile conversions. They experienced a 17% increase in conversions, a 15% reduction in bounce rates, and an 8% increase in conversion rates on recovered carts via Push Notifications.

Lancome headless commerce website

Lilly Pulitzer

Lilly Pulitzer is yet another apparel and accessories retailer that was quick to learn that a majority of their customers accessed their content through mobile devices. They noted that 60% of their total traffic was from mobile customers.

Thus, they decided to go the headless way to improve the mobile customer experience and yield a quick ROI. Through PWAs, they built an awesome mobile-friendly experience. Their relaunched website was built as a PWA on Salesforce Commerce Cloud to create a seamless experience across devices.

Moving to the headless architecture not only saved customers the extra steps of having to download an app but also improved their page speed by 2x to 4x. The result was – an 80% increase in mobile traffic and a 33% increase in mobile revenue.

Lilly Pulitzer headless commerce site

Under Armour

The leading athletic apparel and gear provider adopted the headless approach through the progressive web application Mobify. At The Headless Summit NYC, Patrik Grissinger, the Senior Product Manager at Under Armour summed up their business challenge.

Going the headless way allowed the team to tune their experience based on feedback from data. This approach helped Under Armour transform its website and improve user experience. Now, customers can move through their shopping journey quickly and seamlessly. The brand experienced double-digit revenue growth, 3x return rate, 65% less pre-bounce.

Under Armour Product Manager on headless commerce

Venus

Venus converted its storefront to a React Progressive Web App. The well-known women’s fashion brand had been struggling with slow loading time. In fact, more than 80% of its web pages took over a second to load. This hugely impacted their user experience and conversion rate.

They quickly realized that the future of front-end development was anchored in website optimization. Hence they moved to the headless CMS framework.

When doing so, the fashion brand made two main changes to its store. First, it changed the storefront to a PWA (React PWA), and second, converted its infrastructure into BFF or Backend for Frontend (Node.js). This radical approach yielded Venus high returns. They saw a whopping improvement in the site speed, conversion rate, and customer retention. Improving the site speed created enjoyable experiences for shoppers.

Venus headless commerce website

Blume

Blume offers a range of organic and vegan bodycare products and keeps introducing new products and categories. To accommodate these new additions they had to constantly upgrade their storefront design with unique features.

The challenge was to maintain the website’s performance while doing so. Opting for headless commerce through Shopify’s Storefront API powered by the React frontend framework allowed them to maximize efficiency and ensure high-level performance. It also improved their website loading and search engine performance across multiple markets.

Blume’s headless website also added several dynamic features that create an unforgettable shopping experience. For instance, they shared a quiz page that allows customers to effortlessly build their self-care routine and the perfect Blume box for them.

Similarly, their customer reward program design, Blumetopia has a full-screen video background with good imagery. Such features are only possible with headless commerce that keeps them running smoothly.

Blume headless commerce site

Bamford

The conscious clothing, body care, and homeware brand regularly updates several aspects of its website. For instance, they must constantly share content about Online Classes, Clothing, Workshops & Retreats, seasonal events, and more.

They faced several challenges, including making the development process quicker, more efficient, and more flexible.

Switching to headless CMS technology allowed them to offer an engaging customer experience and speed up their site’s ongoing development. This technology separates content from code but doesn’t have a frontend presentation layer attached. The e-commerce company experienced a smooth experience when updating its website frequently.

Bamford headless commerce

K2 Sports

The Seattle-based American sporting goods company found their old website to limit their possibilities. The store lacked the experience its audience deserved. Moreover, they had to bear huge development and maintenance costs.

What K2 Sports needed was a more cost-effective and feature-rich solution to offer a cutting-edge shopping experience.

They opted for a headless configuration which improved their API performance. On the front end, they leveraged Contentstack for a content-rich experience. With the headless architecture, K2 Sports created a 75% faster website and published content 90% faster. They also boosted their development productivity by 50%.

K2 sports headless commerce site

Nomad

The design-centric brand for smartphone accessories was struggling with page performance. This was negatively impacting their shopping experience, translating into higher cart abandonment and low conversion rates.

Nomad used headless commerce through progressive web apps. This significantly improved their page speed and load time and delivered an exceptional customer experience.

Moreover, their design and development teams could build pages faster and manage more merchandising control of their ever-growing catalog. This gave them immense freedom when rolling out creative marketing campaigns, boosting their conversion rate by 50%. They also saw a 39% increase in revenue per session.

Nomad headless commerce site

Plenaire

This ethical and sustainable skincare brand leveraged headless commerce to create dynamic pages while preserving design integrity and consistency. The team struggled with creating new pages instantly and modifying the page structure.

The result was that the development team spent a lot of time engaging in executing every minor change in the structure. By going headless, their team could leverage modular blocks that create multiple sets of fields within a block in a content type.

They can now mix and match blocks to create customized pages on the go. Now, the website has dynamic pages that transition as the customer scrolls down. Thus, the entire browsing and shopping experience is interactive and aligns with their brand.

Plenaire headless commerce

Summing Up

All the e-commerce companies mentioned in this post have leveraged headless technology to redefine their online experiences and meet the ever-changing demands of shoppers. They stand to testify how headless commerce can provide comprehensive and high-quality solutions for boosting user experience and revenue.

Headless commerce allows online retail businesses to decouple their front end and back end and improve flexibility, scalability, and performance. The enhanced flexibility also enables rigorous experimentation and more risk-taking. However, with continuous experimentation, comes the risk of technical errors that can hamper site performance and cause friction in customer issues.

An error monitoring platform like Noibu alerts you of any website errors that may pop up on your site so you can make the most of the flexibility and enhanced performance that headless commerce has to offer without risking revenue loss due to errors or glitches.

Sign up for a demo of the Noibu platform today to learn how it detects and helps resolve revenue-impacting errors on e-commerce websites.

Posted on July 3, 2024

Astound Digital is a boutique digital consultancy that leverages technology, data and AI, design, and marketing to deliver award-winning digital commerce solutions for the world’s most innovative brands.

In the newest episode of The E-Commerce Toolbox, Kailin Noivo sits down with Anton Grebener, Head of Revenue, and Stanislav Publika, Senior Technical Director of Composable Commerce, to explore headless and composable commerce.

Headless Versus Composable Commerce

Oftentimes headless and composable commerce are used interchangeably to refer to the same concept. While they are very similar, Stanislav explains that there is a distinct difference. Specifically, headless commerce is the architectural approach, whereas composability is the business concept.

Stanislav on headless and composable commerce

Stanislav goes on to explain that there are four pillars of benefits to consider when considering a move toward a composable approach.

The first is customer experience. Taking a headless approach allows you to be flexible in choosing a variety of components from UI libraries, allowing you the option to enhance speed and delivery which will improve your user experience.

The second is technology choice. Taking a headless approach helps you to avoid reliance on a single system. This means that you will be able to simply replace components as and when needed without worrying about cost or performance effects.

The third is cost efficiency. Composable systems are built from widely known technologies, which means it will be easier and cheaper to find developers compared to traditional commerce systems which require highly skilled, niche developers.

The fourth and final pillar is scalability. Composable solutions are cloud-native, thus allowing unique, custom developments to scale independently without affecting the performance of the main system.

Business Impact of Switching to Composable Commerce

Moving to a composable system does not mean you have to start from scratch. There are many pre-composed solutions and reference architectures available across industries that can be used as templates, and you can work with accelerators like Astound Digital do, whenever you deploy new technologies.

In doing so, Astound has seen concrete evidence to suggest that using composable systems is beneficial for website development and deployment. For example, they saw one case with 70% faster loading times and 50% higher mobile conversion rates and another with 30% more page views across all sites and a 20% less bounce rate on mobile.

Anton on the business impact of composable commerce

It seems like a clear positive, but Anton explains that even with these clear improvements to performance, you do still need to monitor whether these actually translate into a financial KPI.

Mitigating Risks of Switching to Composable Commerce

If you are considering moving towards a composable system, you have to be aware of the risks that come with it and how to mitigate them.

The biggest risk comes when you aren’t clear about your business objectives. Whenever you experiment with new technologies, you need to understand what it should lead to, what you are trying to achieve, and what you are trying to improve. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting time and money. Once you have determined these goals, Anton recommends bringing on a technology expert who can target your experimentation toward your business goals.

Both Anton and Stanislav recommend taking the change step by step. Consider going headless first and then composable. Many people underestimate how much time and effort goes into switching from a traditional model to composable, so start with the minimum viable product and iterate from there.

Focus on what’s feasible, not what’s possible.

Listen to the Full Episode Below!

Listen to this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives with Anton Grebener and Stanislav Publika to find out more about headless and composable solutions.

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👉 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3zrMjEF

Posted on June 27, 2024

Founded in 1925, Fendi is a luxury Italian fashion house that has taken over the globe. With over 270 stores globally and an incredible online presence, they are going from strength to strength.

Ghiwa Salhani, E-commerce Supervisor at Fendi, recently sat down with Kailin Noivo on The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives to explore the global luxury fashion brand’s approach to e-commerce, specifically focusing on their Gen Z and Middle Eastern markets.

Targeting Gen Z

Traditionally, the luxury market has only catered their marketing to older audiences, as they are generally more willing to spend large amounts of money on smaller purchases. Ghiwa explains, however, that times are changing and luxury brands, Fendi included, are now having to target Gen Z audiences.

Why?

Because they have a much larger consumption power compared to the same age groups in previous generations, making them some of if not the most powerful spenders.

Ghiwa Salhani on targeting Gen Z

As a group, they are getting smarter with their money. Instead of buying whichever products they like, they look at what a brand stands for, with a specific focus on their sustainability practices, celebrity representation, and values present in the marketing.

They are expecting a lot, which is making it very difficult for luxury brands to stand out. Ghiwa explains that Fendi approaches this challenge by researching who their audience is, and what channels they are coming in through. By using tools like Google Analytics to find out which channels are sending customers to which products, they can tailor their social media campaigns to target specific groups through their preferred channels. AI can be used in this to better drive conversion. 

Driving Conversions and Streamlining Merchandising with AI

So far, Fendi has seen the biggest advantage of AI in its ability to drive conversions. For over a decade now, social media campaigns have driven traffic to websites—that’s not the issue. The challenge is often then getting these customers to convert. Ghiwa explains that AI can help direct and personalize the content a user is seeing by showing them ads that are relevant to their unique profile.

But that’s not the only benefit of AI, Ghiwa has also seen its benefits in merchandising—a task that takes a lot of time for e-commerce professionals. AI can automate merchandising processes, freeing up time to focus elsewhere.

Approaching the Middle Eastern Market

Ghiwa operates in the Middle East, so has a unique insight into e-commerce in the region.

She explains that, compared to the rest of the world, e-commerce in the Middle East is a fairly novel concept as people didn’t really shop online until COVID-19 hit.

Ever since the pandemic, there has been an increase in the number of people shopping online, but it is still challenging for e-commerce sites to compete with brick-and-mortar stores, as people prefer the luxuries of the in-store experience. Thus, Ghiwa recommends operating from an omnichannel perspective, ensuring the store and website complement each other wherever possible.

Many people in the region are not tech-savvy, and they are worried about online scams so are reluctant to hand over their credit card details. The way around this is to make your checkout process as simple as possible and use in-store colleagues to reassure customers that the website is another legitimate option. You can also offer added incentives for shopping online, such as free gifts and exclusive discounts so that people have a reason to move online.

Listen to the Full Episode Below!

Listen to this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives with Ghiwa Salhani and Kailin Noivo to discover more about targeting Gen Z and breaking into the Middle Eastern markets.

👉 Apple: https://bit.ly/3VXPtsg

👉 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4eBKvsH

Posted on June 25, 2024

As an e-commerce business looking to thrive, scale, and grow in today’s market, you’ve probably had to make a decision to replatform your legacy e-commerce system or might be considering it at some point down the road. It’s a necessary evil to keep up with evolving consumer needs and growing business requirements.

For instance, if you’ve been facing repeated issues with website performance during the holiday season when traffic is higher than usual and it’s not something third-party support has been able to resolve, you might need to consider moving to a different platform that better aligns with your business needs.

If this sounds relatable, you are not alone!

In such a situation, e-commerce replatforming can be the turbo fuel to boost your online store’s loading speed, enhance flexibility and capabilities, improve the performance and shopping experience, and boost revenue.

However, replatforming includes a high initial price of the new software and the cost of expert help. Even if you decide to go for a custom platform, you need to invest a considerable amount of time, effort, and money to ensure it sets your business up for success. Hence, without proper planning, you run the risk of going way beyond your budget and making costly mistakes.

Here’s a detailed e-commerce replatforming checklist to ensure a hassle-free migration while averting risks to your online presence, data accuracy, or security.

11-Step E-Commerce Replatforming Checklist

Assessing the Current E-Commerce Platform

Evaluating your existing e-commerce platform is critical to determining the level of performance, functionality, and scalability you are looking for.

Consider elements like stability, reliability, peak traffic management ability, integration capabilities, UX, security features, customization options, mobile device support, and more.

Here’s a quick view into the points you must consider.

Performance – Evaluate the website speed. Does it ensure optimal performance and shopper experience?

Functionality – Does your existing platform offer the functionalities your business needs? For instance, payment options, content management, SEO, and others.

Scalability – Check if your current platform can manage traffic peaks during offers or the holiday season. Does the platform compromise website performance during a spike in traffic?

Integrations – Check if your platform allows easy integration with other systems, third-party applications, and back-end channels like accounting, inventory, sales, ERP, CRM, and marketing. Are there any other third-party capabilities the platform is not able to integrate with?

User Experience – What kind of UX design does the platform offer? Does it make the experience engaging, enjoyable, and seamless for the end users? Do you have design freedom? Are you satisfied with your storefront? What do you think about the current front-end technology? Do you like your current checkout? What does your team think of the current user journey?

Security – Take a look at the security measures implemented by the platform to protect sensitive data. Does it offer data encryption and privacy? Does it implement an SSL certificate? Inspecting the above elements will help you identify the gaps that need to be fixed during your e-commerce replatforming. This will not only form a foundation for a successful transition but also help in getting buy-in for the next platform from leadership.

Based on your analysis define your precise requirements and what you wish to achieve from this replatforming project. Here’s a graphic to help you.

Project Set-Up and Governance

Setting up a clear project structure for e-commerce replatforming is central to getting the buy-in from all the stakeholders – internal and external.

What guiding principles are you planning to include? What can ensure that all parties involved at this stage agree unanimously on realistic and achievable goals?

Here are a few points you should consider when adding structure and discipline to your e-commerce replatforming project.

  • Determine the digital vision for your business that informs every decision throughout the process.
  • Create an initial project scope. Consider factors like existing functionalities, technical considerations, key features of the new platform, user experience, brand engagement deliverables, analytics and reporting, and more.
  • Collect input from the team and all stakeholders about the potential risks. Create a RAID log to track the Risks, Actions, Issues, and Decisions.
  • Work with the concerned stakeholders to define goals and KPIs to measure success. It could be a 15% increase in revenue within one fiscal year or a decrease in maintenance costs six months post-launch. These goals steer decisions related to platform selection, site functionality, marketing efforts, user experience, and more.
  • Decide on the communication process and channels you will follow and the tools needed.
  • Define reporting mechanisms and frequency. Set responsibilities, reporting mechanisms, and reporting tools.

The pointers shared above will help you create a governance charter for the project that must be shared with all the stakeholders.

E-commerce replatforming goals

Finalize Project Budget and Scope

Now is the time to set parameters for your replatforming project. Begin with a budget in mind. Here are a few tips for getting started.

  • Determine the upfront cost of the replatform. Include all the costs involved in building and customizing the existing platform over the past three or more years. Include agency service fees, platform costs, licensing, hosting, developer costs, and more.
  • Build in contingency plan to cover unforeseen expenses or scope creep if any. 
  • Consider the amount signed off by the financial director and agree/sign off on a realistic budget for the transition.
  • Include all the stakeholders when setting KPIs to measure success.
  • Agree on a prioritization criteria for the project’s scope. For instance, the MoSCow prioritization presents initiatives in 4 categories: must-have, should-have, could-have, and won’t-have, or will not have right now.
  • Similarly, the Eisenhower Matrix allows you to prioritize based on the urgency and importance of the initiatives.

Once you have agreed on the scope and the prioritization criteria, get the scoping document approved and signed off by the project lead.

 
Here are a few key questions your team should ponder at this stage.

  • How much are you willing to spend on the new platform? 
  • What are your CapEx capabilities?
  • What are our OpEx capabilities?
  • How do you see your revenue improve over the next 3-5 years?
  • Will third-party costs come from a separate budget? 
  • Where can consultants be accounted for in the budget? 
  • Will marketing audits be paid from the marketing budget or the replatforming budget?
MoSCow prioritization for e-commerce replatforming

Research and Choose the New Platform

When looking for a new e-commerce platform, you must go beyond the basics. For instance, if you are a large-scale multi-vendor business, you will need a platform that offers quick technical support and assists you with complex e-commerce functionalities.

You also need to decide whether to go for an off-the-shelf platform or a headless/ composable platform. Here’s some quick information on this matter to help you decide.

Off-the-Shelf E-Commerce Platforms

These are a piece of readymade software that can be purchased and installed right away. They have been developed and tested successfully on several businesses.

Advantages

  • Affordability – Off-the-shelf enterprise solutions are cost-effective compared to custom ones because the development cost is shared among multiple users.
  • Quick Deployment – Since these are pre-built, they assure quick deployment with a large library of existing templates and features.
  • Great Support – Since these solutions see regular updates and security patches from the provider, they are usually up-to-date with the latest features. Vulnerabilities are promptly addressed.

Disadvantages

  • Limited Scope for Customization – These solutions come with pre-defined features and templates. So, e-commerce companies have less control over the design, layout, or functionality, hindering their ability to create unique experiences.
  • Lack of Scalability – These solutions do not offer the scalability needed for long-term growth. Since customization options are limited, it’s tough to accommodate specific requirements as the business evolves.
  • Over-Dependency on the Provider – Businesses often have to rely on the provider for updates, bug fixes, and support. This ultimately impacts your e-commerce store performance.

Headless and Composable E-Commerce Platforms

Headless commerce focuses on decoupling the front-end presentation layer from the back-end e-commerce functionality. However, since you are tethered to the back-end engine, you don’t have the flexibility to change the tech stack with new services.

Composable commerce is based on the modular architecture. It revolves around “composing” unique customer experiences by plugging best-of-breed building blocks/components like shopping cart, checkout, and payment processing. In both cases, the frontend delivery is not reliant on the backend, hence they offer similar features, functions, and advantages.

Advantages

  • Offers Flexibility – Since the front and back ends are decoupled, it offers businesses more control over their stack. For instance, in composable commerce, they can pick, swap, and remove components to create systems that work best for them.
  • High Cost-Effectiveness – Both work on the pay-as-you-go model. They eliminate the need to pay for things you don’t require. Hence, businesses can optimize costs based on utilization.
  • Improves Scalability – Both promote agility and scalability by allowing the backend to handle heavy loads independently from the front end. Composable commerce leverages the modularity of microservices. Thus, scaling the front end or adding new channels will not impact the performance of the e-commerce platform.
  • Minimizes Vendor Lock-In – The decoupling of the frontend and backend (headless) and the ability to use modular and interchangeable services (composable), allows businesses to switch providers easily. Ease of Integration – Both offer APIs for integration with third-party systems and applications.
  • Encourages Experimentation – Since these platforms offer unparalleled flexibility and scalability, they encourage you to foster a culture of experimentation and take risks to continuously optimize user experiences.
  • Better Control – Headless and composable platforms offer better control over your front-end customer experiences so you can deliver highly-personalized user journeys.

Disadvantages

  • Increases Operational Overheads – Scaling needs careful orchestration and management. This may increase the overheads.
  • Flexibility Brings in Complexity – Increased flexibility introduces complexities that demand a skilled development team to manage and integrate diverse components. To know more about this, let’s look at this graphic that sums up the 4 types of e-commerce platforms and how they compare

To make a promising decision, here are the best practices we recommend:

  • Run a gap analysis to see if the platforms meet your needs versus the native platform. Create a weightage score card, showing a detailed comparison of options available.
  • Shortlist at least 3 viable platforms. Review their documentation and professional reviews. Speak to industry contacts using the platform to validate platform assumptions.
  • Arrange focused product demos to deep dive into how they satisfy your business requirements.
  • Speak to vendors about the indicative project building cost. Review license costs. Compare all the above to building a headless platform.
Types of E-commerce platforms

Building a TCO Cost Model

Before any commitments are made to agencies, you need to figure out what the new platform costs over its lifecycle.

And how it compares with the other platforms. Also, what are the expected financial benefits of replatforming

Merely considering the upfront development and licensing costs isn’t enough. Create a three-to-five-year TCO (total cost of ownership) model that maps all Capex and Opex costs during the project’s lifetime.

total cost of ownership

This will include software license fees, third-party software add-ons, design and implementation services, revenue sharing, cloud-hosting fees, post-launch maintenance, planned site enhancements, customer experience, marketing services, software upgrades, and security patches.

Here are a few points to remember when creating a total cost of ownership model.

  • Define all project cost streams – Capex and Opex.
  • Define your GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) revenue targets. This value is calculated before the deduction of any expenses. It’s a measure of the growth of the business, sharing the total value of goods sold on a marketplace over a specific period. When revenue increases, so do the expenses. A great indicator of the platform’s success and sustainability is the percentage share of the GMV coming down as it should over the lifetime. 
  • For a smarter approach to TCO, consider company needs in 5 years, speed to market, upgrades, and flexibility of the platform. For instance, if you need to quickly launch a new e-commerce store what will be the opportunity cost of not moving fast? Similarly, determine how often upgrades are needed and the effort involved. What is the investment in upgrading? Often, it is an added six-figure investment every three years.

Measuring the Business Impact

Once you have evaluated all the factors shared so far, it’s time to assess how the replatforming will impact the business.

Though the new platform promises improved functionality and performance, you are bound to experience a few hiccups. The return on investment will take some time to be realized.

It’s important to consider the potential downtime and interruptions that will cross your way. Further, during replatforming, it’s not uncommon to see a negative impact on SEO performance – at least, initially.

These quick tips will help you along the way.

  • Back up the old website data and metrics. If you face issues, reinstall the old version. Search engine bots will not index the pages on your test site’s URL until they’re published.
  • Separate SEO migration from a website revamp. Stick to one change at a time. For instance, when migrating to a new platform, keep your website design, content, domain name, and metadata the same.
  • Large e-commerce sites tend to have thousands of pages. When migrating review your existing pages and remove the dead weight.
  • Map redirects one-to-one. Redirects ensure that your shoppers access the same content on new URLs while directing search engines to the new URLs.
  • To avoid SEO issues, avoid redirecting 100 product URLs to a collection. Instead, invest time in mapping each product URL to the same new URL.
  • Track and fix 404 errors (broken links) on your website, including those old internal links missed in your redirection strategy.
  • Watch for pages with duplicate content and use canonical URLs to direct search engines to the original content.
  • Submit a new XML sitemap through Google Search Console. This will speed up the indexing process.

Data Migration and Integration

Protecting your existing content and data is critical. First things first, back up your e-commerce data, allowing you and your customers to access it in case something goes wrong.

Data migration includes –

  • Product, customer, inventory records, and past order data
  • Store configurations and promotions
  • Extensions and existing integrations
  • Themes and custom modules
  • Code customization
  • Plugins migration

Further, system migration is key. You need to connect the new e-commerce platform with systems like CRM, ERP, payment gateways, and more.

Consider these points to plan and implement the perfect data migration.

  • Identify the data you intend to migrate – mentioned above.
  • Cleanse your data by getting rid of duplicate records, incomplete sets, errors, and outdated information. Centralize disparate legacy data systems to ensure it is accurate, actionable, relevant, and consolidated.
  • During replatforming, your store may experience downtime. Make sure you give your customers a heads-up on this. For instance, leave a fun message explaining the situation or offer an alternative solution.
  • Consider migrating data incrementally, allowing customers and stakeholders to view the sample sets and correct any issues.
  • Consider extra factors like API compatibility and data security measures.

Design and Customization

Next, it’s time to evaluate your customer experience and implement all the requirements stated in your project scope.

  • For the user interface, focus on delivering pleasing, intuitive, and seamless navigation. This includes color schemes, typography, and layout.
  • For brand identity pay attention to your logo, brand colors, and visual elements. Be consistent throughout the website.

  • Go for a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes.

  • Opt for dynamic content, targeted recommendations, and personalized product suggestions based on customer behavior and preferences.

  • Pay attention to site speed optimization and accessibility standards compliance.

  • User testing is a must to identify usability issues or areas for improvement before launching the website.

Security and Hosting

Protecting sensitive customer data like cardholder data, names, and addresses is a critical part of a successful e-commerce replatforming process.

Here are a few points to consider during the replatforming process.

  • Incorporate advanced security protocols and conduct thorough testing. Implementing advanced security protocols and rigorous testing is central to protecting sensitive customer data throughout the transition.
  • Review security patches for all software in the stack.
  • Make sure your development team is trained to tackle top vulnerabilities.
  • Invest in automated code-sniffing tools that spot vulnerabilities. Ensure that your code undergoes a thorough review process before implementation.
  • Opt for an e-commerce platform with a strong security track record. Verify if your selected platform, third-party systems, and implementation partners meet PCI DSS, GDPR, and other compliance standards.
  • Regularly test your applications, systems, and processes to identify and mitigate security gaps.

End-to-End Developer Visibility

Replatforming is a big change for your website backend. Therefore, bugs and technical glitches tend to show up repeatedly and unexpectedly because there are several moving parts. This can cause friction in the shopper experience and hurt your sales as you make the transition.

Regardless of which platform you choose, website errors and bugs can never be completely eliminated. Moreover, only 10% of customers end up submitting a support ticket when something breaks on your website. Thus, support tickets are just a small portion of the usability issues reported.

For the rest of the errors, your team is left in the dark. 55% of developers admit that if they didn’t have to spend so much time spotting and fixing bugs, they would have the time to build new features and functionality. Therefore, the IT and development teams deserve the necessary visibility into site functionality and errors, enabling them to make proactive resolutions, especially during migration.

Noibu – the robust error detection, prioritization, and resolution platform not only detects and flags errors in real-time but also calculates their predicted impact on annual revenue so you can quickly address the most impactful issues on priority.

The platform offers the necessary technical details developers need to instantly resolve high-priority issues without having to waste hours replicating or investigating them.

With Noibu as your co-pilot during an e-commerce replatform, you can rest assured that any errors that pop up are going to be flagged to your team in real time so that your transition is smooth and frictionless.

Risk Analysis and Mitigation

Risk is an inseparable part of every e-commerce migration because the project is complex, time-consuming, and involves many stakeholders, business processes, and technology systems.

For instance, potential scope creep, unintended changes, compatibility issues, and staff orientation challenges can negatively impact the project’s success.

Approach these e-commerce replatforming risks proactively to minimize the disruption they can cause. Follow these tips. Talk to your team and all the stakeholders about the potential risks and collate all information. Prioritize these risks based on their impact on the project. Also, add the approved risks to the RAID log.

Appoint a responsibility center for each risk and create a risk mitigation plan that involves monitoring the risk impact. Decide on the risk escalation path and reporting frequency. Not all risks need a mitigation plan. Make sure you invest your resources where you get the most value.

Summing Up

Moving to a technologically advanced e-commerce platform allows businesses to achieve higher scalability and provide a better customer experience. However, as your team transitions to the new platform, shoppers will continue their purchase journey and expect seamless experiences.

Make your e-commerce replaforming journey a success by considering all the pointers shared above in the context of your business goals. Noibu proves to be a fitting partner during this transition. The platform can help you prioritize errors based on revenue impact and provide all necessary details to get you cracking on fixing these issues, without getting overwhelmed during a code migration.

Get in touch with our team now to know more about Noibu and how we can help you. You can also sign up for a free demo to experience Noibu in action. 

Posted on June 24, 2024

In today’s digital age, the success of e-commerce platforms hinges not only on whether it has an intuitive interface but also on the robust search functionalities that can direct consumers to relevant results with minimum fuss and high accuracy. Ryan Finley is the Senior Manager of E-commerce Search and Findability at Ferguson Enterprises.

In a recent episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives, Ryan spoke with Kailin Noivo and shared his wealth of experience and insights into optimizing e-commerce search, emphasizing the role of collaboration. He also delved into the limitations of AI in enhancing search functionalities. Roles focused on Search are fascinating ones that require lots of collaboration, and a big part of the position is about educating colleagues and bringing people up to speed on really what search involves.

The Importance of Collaboration in Search

Ryan begins by highlighting the pivotal role of collaboration in driving successful search operations within e-commerce. And though he has worked with many different departments and done so successfully throughout his career, for Ryan, it is the synergy that can exist between search and merchandising departments that is most important to nurture and get right.

As far as Ryan is concerned, if you work on search and findability in a silo, separated from the goals of merchandising or the rest of the company, you are setting yourself up to lose.

If you can successfully align search objectives with merchandising goals, it ensures that search results will meet customer expectations while supporting those all-important business objectives.

Ryan also has a word of warning for situations where search is entirely embedded within merchandising. In these situations he stresses a need to be aware of the danger that search goals are swallowed and overwhelmed by the promotional goals of the merchandising department.

As Ryan explains, if a customer searches for Women’s Dresses, you better show them Women’s Dresses right there at the top of the search and not Women’s Jeans just because that’s what the company is looking to push at that particular moment.

When to Create a Specialized Search Department

As e-commerce businesses scale, the question of when to establish a dedicated search team will start to rear its head, and getting that decision right is extremely important. Ryan shared his thoughts on when to do this on this episode. He emphasizes that although the amount of SKUs your company is important, it shouldn’t be the deciding factor. “It’s not necessarily just about volume or how many SKUs you have” he explains.

Ryan Finley on creating a specialized search department

Although, of course, if you have more SKUs it will be very useful to have a dedicated search department. But this becomes irrelevant if you don’t have the people power or the relevant skills in your company to actually execute the set-up of this new department. Ryan’s experience underscores that business must evaluate their operational capacity to effectively manage a specialized Search team.

Look at your numbers, and make a decision – can you and they meet the demands of your e-commerce platform, or will you and they be overstretched?

Limitations of AI in E-Commerce Search

Artificial Intelligence holds a lot of promise for transforming e-commerce search through automation and enhanced personalization. It’s clear that there’s so much excitement and the possibilities are being discussed all the time.

Ryan provides an interesting counterpoint and a valuable reality check when it comes to search. His slightly alternative perspective is that there are still too many limitations currently with AI for it to be of much use to people in his position.

“AI needs more time to cook” he suggests. He points out that while AI can automate tasks like product recommendations, it often fails to grasp the nuanced preferences of consumers.

People, that is to say, human professionals know that when people search for products online, browsing options are at least part of the experience. AI may overlook the customers’ preference for taking a look at multiple options before selecting a product.

With this in mind, Ryan advocates for a cautious approach to AI adoption in e-commerce search, highlighting the importance of human oversight in interpreting customer intent accurately.

Ryan Finley on limitations of AI

Ryan Finley’s expertise offers valuable insights into navigating the complexities of e-commerce search. From the importance of collaborative efforts across departments to the strategic considerations of establishing specialized search teams, and the evolving role of AI, Ryan’s perspective provides a comprehensive view of optimizing search functionalities in e-commerce. Whether you’re a seasoned e-commerce professional or exploring ways to enhance your platform’s search capabilities, this episode provides actionable insights to drive meaningful improvements.

Listen to the Full Episode Below!

Listen to this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives with Ryan Finley and Kailin Noivo to discover just what a career in search looks like and the challenges that go along with it:

👉 Apple: https://apple.co/3z6X4fb

👉 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3zaXPEc

Posted on June 21, 2024

Client-side frameworks like React, Angular, Ember, and Vue have gained popularity as they allow e-commerce websites to deliver better performance and user experience. As websites grow in complexity and scale, JavaScript frameworks will continue to be a critical aspect of delivering a seamless user experience.

However, given the increased dependence on these robust frameworks, e-commerce websites are also prone to a higher number of JavaScript errors that can disrupt the user experience and hurt business revenue.

In this blog post, we discuss the importance of monitoring your website for JavaScript errors to deliver seamless online shopping experiences and prevent any potential revenue loss due to bugs that cause customer frustration.

What Is JavaScript Monitoring?

JavaScript monitoring is the practice of systematically observing and analyzing website performance, behavior, and errors connected to JS code execution. Monitoring this code is central to ensuring the seamless functioning of websites, optimizing performance, and improving UX.

JavaScript error monitoring offers developers and IT teams insights into diagnosing JavaScript errors and their impact on e-commerce performance, code optimization, and user experience.

The key aspects of JavaScript monitoring are:

Performance Monitoring

Performance monitoring encompasses tracking and analyzing the execution time and JavaScript code efficiency. It identifies bottlenecks, optimizes critical e-commerce paths, and enhances the overall experience of the online store. We have shared a detailed post explaining performance monitoring and its benefits on our blog. Read it here.

Code Profiling

In code profiling, developers can analyze JavaScript code execution to assess which functions consume the most resources. It helps in pinpointing areas for optimization and improvement.

Error Detection

Error detection refers to the process of automating the detection and resolution of JavaScript bugs that hamper user experience in real-time to minimize their negative impact on customer journeys and revenue.

UX Monitoring

By monitoring how JavaScript code performs on various browsers, devices, and network conditions, one can assess user experience. Often, Real User Monitoring or RUM is used to collect data from real users. This provides insights into website performance from the end-user perspective.

Resource Usage Monitoring

This involves tracking how the JS code consumes system resources like memory usage and CPU utilization. It helps in identifying potential memory leaks and performance issues.

Synthetic Monitoring

Synthetic monitoring involves proactively identifying potential performance issues using automated testing of various scenarios. Simulating user interactions ensures that the website meets the performance expectations under these conditions.

Third-Party Apps Monitoring

It’s impossible to completely avoid third-party scripts and plugins as they are imperative to enhance the functionality of your e-commerce website. However, sometimes these third-party apps slow down your site or negatively impact the user experience by interacting with your custom code. So, it’s critical to monitor third-party apps for how they interact with your site and any negative impact they might have.

What Happens if You Ignore JavaScript Monitoring?

The HTML code is the basic building block of the page while cascading stylesheets (CSS) are used to control the layout of elements in the page. Then we have the JavaScript code, either embedded in the pages or imported as separate files.

The JavaScript code comprises the web application and unlike CSS and HTML, JavaScript is not just used for visual display of the page. Hence, errors in JavaScript can have a substantial impact on user experience and overall performance.

So, if you aren’t monitoring JavaScript, you cannot assess –

  • What errors occur frequently depending on page type and browser version
  • Which ones force your shoppers to abandon the store
  • Which browsers are shooting errors when shoppers add items to their cart
  • Which device type and OS is a particular error most commonly occurring on
  • The correlation between JavaScript errors and revenue

Frequent JS errors directly impact e-commerce conversion rate and revenue. Reports reveal that 94% of e-commerce websites have 5 or more live undetected errors that impact shopper experience and revenue. And this poor UX costs them 5 purchases a year per customer with 8% abandoning more than 10 purchases.

Hence, uncaught JS errors greatly threaten e-commerce performance and revenue. Let’s explore the common errors in JavaScript and how to identify them.

Types of JavaScript Errors

Syntax Error

These are the most common JS errors e-commerce websites come across. They occur when the code violates the language’s rules, thereby failing to run the program.

The error is usually because of some missing or misplaced character. In the above code, the opening bracket is missing.

Syntax error

Reference Error

These errors occur when the user tries to access a variable or object that is out of scope, hasn’t been declared, or cannot be found. The error often occurs when a variable is used before it is declared or when an undefined object property is referenced. In this ‘x’ is the variable that has been initialized but hasn’t been defined. Hence, it shoots an error.

Reference error

Type Error

Type errors are common in JavaScript as it is a dynamically typed language that allows developers to change the type of a variable during runtime. But this flexibility often causes type-related errors. They occur when a function is not intended to be used in a particular way. 

Type javascript error

Output: 

Here, the value used is outside the scope of its data type. A few cases where this error occurs –

  • Invoking objects that aren’t methods
  • Trying to access properties of undefined objects
  • Taking a string to be a number

Fetch Error

Various errors occur when using the Fetch API, a modern JavaScript interface for making network requests. JavaScript fetch errors could be server error (500), not found error (404), network error, CORS error, and more. This code will throw a fetch error as we are passing an invalid API key. 

Internal Error

This error usually occurs when there is too much data and the stack exceeds its critical size. This overwhelms the JS engine, leading to the error. An internal error occurs when –

  • When a patch or JavaScript update carries a bug that throws exceptions
  • When the code contains entities that are too large for the JS engine
  • For instance, too many switch cases, large array initializers, or too much recursion.

URI Error

This occurs when a global URI handling function like decodeURIComponent is used illegally and a wrong character(s) is used in a URI function. That’s because the parameter passed to the method call doesn’t conform to URI standards.

Practical Tips for JavaScript Monitoring Success

Merely monitoring the number of JavaScript errors during sessions isn’t enough. It’s important to find them on key pages, correlate them to the conversion rate, and fix them proactively.

Proactive JS error detection helps you quickly log errors occurring in the client-side code and performance bottlenecks that impact UX.

Here are a few best practices we recommend for going about it.

1. Reduce Noisy JavaScript Errors


Noisy JS errors can leave your development team overwhelmed. Therefore, it’s important to determine what errors matter.
Prioritize errors by frequency, severity, and most importantly – revenue impact. Ask yourself these questions

  • Does the error impact critical user journeys? If an error isn’t impacting your shopper’s ability to sign up, log in, or complete a purchase, that will be low on priority
  • Has the error occurred recently? Focus on newer errors first to prevent them from becoming larger issues.
  • Does this error result in high latency? If that’s the case, you need to prioritize them first.

The answers to these questions will help you solely focus on the JavaScript errors that matter.

Secondly, configure allowed domains, allowing you to automatically ignore errors coming from debugging scripts or third-party scripts from another domain.

Finally, filter out errors caused by browser extensions. Extensions often pose a challenge when it comes to front-end JavaScript monitoring. Several browsers are available today, each unique because of the wide range of browser extensions users install.

This can cause your JavaScript to crash. But these crashes aren’t related to JavaScript code. Make sure you ignore errors with browser extensions to cut out the noise.

2. Get Rid of Old-Version Browsers

When e-commerce developers try to use modern JavaScript features that aren’t supported on older browsers or browser versions, it may shoot an error. Old browser versions are tough to deal with because they are prone to crashing and may not even show in error reports. So, we recommend using modern browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. Also, you can silence the crash notifications in the older browser version, allowing you to focus on errors impacting your shoppers.

3. Track Key User Interactions

Tracking and collecting fine-grained data on user interactions reveals slowdowns, allowing you to optimize the user flow. For instance, when a shopper adds an item to the cart, a modal popup with suggestions comes up. This user interaction is important to monitor as it triggers varied browser activity, like a series of API calls, updating the data state, and re-rendering the components. Any latency in the loading of the popup will ruin the overall experience, forcing the shopper to leave.

Tools like Google Analytics and Search Console give a rough idea of how shoppers behave. Click-tracking tools record the elements the user clicks while scroll-tracking tools record the scrolls.

4. Leverage Source Maps

One of the most effective ways to debug in JavaScript is by pinpointing the specific line of code that has crashed. A lot of the code running in your browser is optimized to tackle latency issues. Though this is a great way to optimize website performance, it can get in the way of the debugging process, if something goes wrong. That’s where you need Source Maps to map your minified code to your actual lines of code.

It can be a huge chore for your development team to dig backward through several layers of transformations to find the source file and line of code with errors/ Source maps detect where a line of code is causing an error. It points to minified source code, rather than the original source code.

5. Prioritize Errors Based on How They Impact Users

One glance at the raw error report fails to offer a complete overview of the website’s performance and health. At times, you have a spike in errors impacting a shopper. On the other hand, you have an error impacting a huge cohort of shoppers. It is wise to prioritize the latter. Given the volume of errors in large e-commerce domains, it’s tough for developers to know where to start.

Noibu: Your End-to-End JavaScript Monitoring Co-pilot

Noibu, an e-commerce error monitoring platform helps you monitor and address JS errors efficiently. Here’s how:

Real-Time Error Detection

Noibu automatically monitors your e-commerce website and promptly flags all errors in real-time, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks. In addition to common JavaScript errors, like syntax and runtime errors, it identifies GraphQL, HTTP, and Image errors that can disrupt your shopper’s journey.

Prioritization Based on Revenue-Impact

Noibu alerts you when an error occurs and prioritizes all issues based on the impact they have on your revenue. This way, you can confidently choose which errors to address first to minimize the negative impact on your e-commerce sales and conversions.

Technical Details to Provide Quick Resolution

Noibu simplifies JavaScript monitoring by providing all the technical details required by your e-commerce developers to quickly resolve errors without having to spend endless hours replicating them or finding corresponding user sessions.

Here are a few features Noibu offers for effective JavaScript error detection and resolution.

Session Playback

Session recordings allow you to understand what the user is experiencing, spot optimization opportunities, and fix errors and functionalities that might be disrupting their experience. These are renderings of real user interaction on the website, showing mouse movement, clicks, taps, and scrolling across multiple web pages on devices.

Source Maps

With a source map, Noibu’s Stacktrace can point directly at the source file and line of code that is shooting the error and disrupting UX. Thus, it takes the guesswork out of the debugging process.

Priority View

With Noibu’s console, you can sort through issues and determine which need immediate attention and the ones that can be put off or dismissed. The error detection and monitoring tool collects nuanced data about every issue detected, and a product owner can use this data to parse through the pile and quickly identify high-priority issues. The Priority View provides a peek into issues that are revenue-impacting and resolvable.

JavaScript Versioning

Assigning a unique version to your JavaScript offers insights into whether the development team has fixed a bug with the latest deployment (not old versions) or is seeing the same bug in the new code.

NoibuJS script collects issue and session data from the e-commerce website to report in the Noibu platform. Noibu updates the script, allowing it to operate efficiently, pull a wider breadth of data, and avoid issues.

Summing Up

Proactive JavaScript monitoring can help your team spot and resolve issues ruining your revenue early. Make sure you incorporate the strategies and practices shared in this post to boost your website UX, sales, and conversions. When it comes to JavaScript errors, there’s a lot to explore and learn. Make sure you follow Noibu’s blog for the latest and practical recommendations on this subject.

Posted on June 21, 2024

With more and more consumers turning to online shopping, businesses face the challenge of ensuring their e-commerce platforms run smoothly and effectively. One crucial aspect of this process is specialized monitoring and businesses that fail to innovate risk being left behind.

In this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox, Kailin Noivo welcomes the new VP of Sales at Noibu, Dan Wardle, to share his unique perspectives on future-proofing e-commerce strategies, drawing from his experience in working with various companies like BlackBerry, Salesforce, and Vidyard.

Dan explores the significant gap in e-commerce monitoring tools, emphasizing the need for solutions tailored to specific processes like checkout and add-to-cart. He also delves into current trends, including the importance of conversion rate optimization, page speed, search functionalities, and the move towards composable and headless systems for a positive business impact.

Dan Wardle on the gap in the e-commerce industry

Bridging the Monitoring Gap in E-commerce

Dan observed a significant gap in the market concerning e-commerce monitoring. While various industries employ monitoring tools to ensure functionality, the specific needs of e-commerce have often been overlooked.

“But there’s this gap in between where nobody thought to actually monitor the e-commerce checkout flow and add to cart flow and all of that because it’s kind of a niche. It’s in the e-commerce space specifically, and so you can’t build a horizontal tool that’s gonna work for all companies because Salesforce’s website doesn’t work on an add-to-cart function, so nobody’s monitoring that whole functionality. And that’s, I think, really, where this gap exists”

This gap is due to the unique requirements of e-commerce websites that differ from other online platforms. Unlike general product designers who can work across various industries using similar tools, e-commerce necessitates specialized tools to monitor critical processes like the checkout flow and add-to-cart functionality, which directly impact customer transactions and revenue. Issues in these areas, such as slow page load times, payment processing errors, and glitches in adding items to the cart, can lead to customer frustration and revenue loss.

This realization led Wardle to join Noibu, a company dedicated to filling this gap. By providing tools to monitor the specific functionalities of e-commerce websites, Noibu helps businesses ensure their sites operate smoothly and efficiently, thus preventing potential losses in revenue due to technical issues.

Headless Commerce: Flexibility and Customization

A significant trend Wardle discusses is the move towards headless commerce. This approach allows businesses to decouple the front end of their website from the back end, providing greater flexibility and customization options. As Wardle notes, “They want to make their customers feel special and make sure everything’s working… moving off of some legacy tools onto more of a headless system.”

Headless commerce empowers businesses to tailor their customer interactions more precisely. By leveraging various tools and technologies, companies can create unique and engaging shopping experiences that align with their brand identity. This customization is particularly crucial for brands that prioritize quality and a seamless customer experience. 

Dan Wardle on going headless

Dan highlights the challenges and opportunities associated with this transition. While headless commerce offers numerous benefits, it also requires careful planning and execution. “It’s like your store got a revamp… your store has a different logo, like a huge difference, and everything is in a different color,” he explains. Businesses must navigate these changes carefully to ensure they enhance rather than disrupt the customer experience. 

AI: The Next Frontier in E-commerce

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to revolutionize e-commerce by automating and optimizing various aspects of the business. Dan shares insights from industry conferences, where the potential of AI in e-commerce was a hot topic. “What I’m learning is… how does AI actually start to help that by, automatically building new product pages… suggesting what’s going on based on your history?”

AI can significantly enhance efficiency and effectiveness in e-commerce operations. By automating routine tasks such as product description writing, inventory management, and customer recommendations, AI allows businesses to focus on more strategic activities. This technology also enables personalized shopping experiences, mimicking the in-store experience where a sales associate might suggest products based on a customer’s preferences.

However, Dan emphasizes that while the future is promising, adopting AI will require a leap of faith from businesses. Many companies are hesitant to fully trust AI with critical aspects of their operations. “They want to wait till it’s crossed the chasm… people have to make that leap of faith,” he notes. As AI technologies mature, more businesses will likely embrace them, leading to even more innovative and efficient e-commerce practices.

“But when I talk to customers and attendees, they kind of see that as the 23 year vision, and they’re interested to see how other companies do it. They don’t wanna be the early adopters. They wanna wait till we’re past that hurdle, that leap of faith that people have to make you wanna. They wanna wait till it’s crossed the chasm in the old sense. So that’s what’s exciting about the future is that it’s just super automated and super efficient. But there’s a lot of proof in the pudding that needs to happen over the next couple of years.”

Looking Ahead

Dan Wardle’s insights highlight the transformative potential of headless commerce and AI in the e-commerce industry. By bridging the monitoring gap, adopting flexible and customizable solutions, and leveraging AI for automation and optimization, businesses can supercharge their growth and deliver exceptional customer experiences. As Wardle aptly summarizes, “It’s exciting to see this transition to e-commerce… different trends that are happening.”

Listen to the Full Episode Below!

Tune in to this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives with Dan Wardle and Kailin Noivo to learn more about how effective monitoring strategies and the right tools ensure that e-commerce platforms remain available, perform optimally, and achieve sustained success.

👉 Apple: https://apple.co/3VHHlMI

👉 Spotify:https://spoti.fi/3Xn4B3O

Posted on June 6, 2024

A recent study revealed that poor performance costs online retailers $76.3 billion in lost sales annually. That’s a huge price to pay for a subpar online experience that can easily be optimized.

One sure-fire way to prevent such misfortunes is through performance monitoring where the team gets to gauge, manage, and streamline the health of their digital storefront.

Owing to the effective solutions it offers, performance monitoring is quickly becoming an indispensable tool for improving shopper experience and boosting e-commerce revenue. In this post, we dive deep into performance monitoring and how it can spot outages before they occur and save time and effort for your e-commerce team.

What Is Performance Monitoring?

Performance monitoring involves tracking and analyzing the execution time and efficiency of a website to identify bottlenecks, optimize critical e-commerce paths, and enhance the overall UX of the website.

Performance monitoring involves the following components –

Web Stress Test

This assesses how the website performs when there’s a sudden spike in traffic during a flash sale or the holiday season. The insights derived help the team understand resource requirements during this period.

API Monitoring

API monitoring involves testing load, function, regression, and performance to assess the static and dynamic resources. It offers useful information that developers and DevOps teams can leverage to improve the shopping experience.

Uptime Monitoring

As mentioned earlier, uptime monitoring checks the availability of the website and the response time to avoid outages (downtime), especially when the traffic spikes. Uptime monitoring spots the issue and alerts early so that the right person on the development team is notified.

Synthetic Monitoring

Through this, the e-commerce team can check the functionality of pages by simulating shopper actions, such as visiting the website, registering, browsing through products, and making purchases. They replicate user actions to identify errors early.

Thus, through synthetic monitoring, your team can paint a comprehensive picture of your user base by testing from diverse browsers, viewports, and network speeds.

Real User Monitoring

Real user monitoring offers insights into website performance by analyzing user behavior and interactions, identifying issues, and collecting data like page views, time spent on a page, and load time.

The Need for E-commerce Performance Monitoring

Continuous and proactive performance monitoring plays a significant role in maintaining and building a robust e-commerce website. With accurate performance monitoring tools, you can deep-dive into the root cause of issues impacting shopper experience and your revenue.

A well-performing website ensures:

– Increased website conversions and sales

– Enhanced visitor retention

– Lower bounce rates

– Improved performance in the search engine page results

Here’s why your e-commerce company should consider performance monitoring.

To perform real-time system checks: Performance monitoring allows e-commerce teams to know system status, regardless of where their web servers reside in the world.

To gain end-to-end visibility: It offers visibility into system performance for on-premise and cloud-based servers. Lack of this visibility can lead to integration issues. Performance monitoring allows teams to look across a complex landscape of infrastructure, applications, and user interfaces and pinpoint the root cause of performance issues.

To reduce the operational costs: Regular monitoring and improving website performance e-commerce companies can head off many crises that otherwise require hours to resolve. This reduces the operating costs, often passed along to the customer as higher pricing.

To reduce shopping cart abandonment: Poor website performance makes it so difficult to complete a purchase, that shoppers simply walk away. Performance monitoring can get rid of the technical issues that ruin shopper experience and cause churn.

To improve CX and brand loyalty: Poor website performance leads to user frustration, seriously impacting your e-commerce revenue. Performance monitoring helps offset this risk and optimizes site functionality.

How is Performance Monitoring Different from Observability

Both performance monitoring and observability may seem similar as both offer substantial insight into end-to-end performance and security for applications.

However, the key difference lies in the depth of insights they offer. Performance monitoring offers a high-level way of tracking system health. On the other hand, observability dives deep into the technical details developers need for root cause analysis.

Performance monitoring takes observability a step further by offering the ‘why’ behind the issue. E-commerce developers and teams can leverage monitoring and observability to track health and performance which helps in ensuring issues are addressed quickly.

Performance Monitoring and Google’s Core Web Vitals: What’s the Connection?

Google’s Core Web Vitals is a subset of Web Vitals that plays a central role in ranking how well web pages deliver quality user experience. The performance metrics used in Core Web Vitals are key performance indicators like connection speed, content loading speed, page speed, interactivity, bottlenecks, and visual stability.

Core Web Vitals represent a distinct facet of the user experience and reflect the real-world experience of critical user-centric outcomes. The metrics evolve based on Google updates that consider granular details influencing website performance.

At present, Web Vitals focuses on three aspects of the UX: loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

Google's Core Web Vitals

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – measures the time it takes large images to render after a user tries to load a page.

First Input Delay (FID) – measures the time between a user’s first interaction with a website and when a browser can respond to that interaction.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – is a measure of the page’s visual stability. With performance monitoring, e-commerce companies can proactively and reactively test how well their web elements are meeting Core Web Vitals standards.

Uptime monitoring, for instance, tracks the uptime ratio – availability of the website, including response time that is evaluated from different locations. This is critical to prevent potential revenue loss due to downtime. Thus, tracking and fixing the uptime ratio will directly impact shopper experience and satisfaction.

Performance Monitoring Best Practices

Set Clear Objectives

For most tech disciplines, the best way to leverage performance monitoring is by setting the goal.

  • What are you planning to accomplish through performance monitoring?
  • What opportunities do you want to explore with your web properties?
  • What performance challenges are you facing?
  • How are these issues impacting customer experience?
  • What kind of budget are you planning for this?


The responses to these questions will help you determine what you are looking to achieve through performance monitoring.

Besides, factor these elements into your performance monitoring strategy.

End-User Experience

Who are your users? What are their expectations? Identify the top three frustrations faced by your users recently. Work according to the user journey stages. For instance, login, browsing, content consumption, and more.
Set specific goals for each stage to ensure a seamless experience.

Industry Benchmarks

Incorporate industry standards in your performance monitoring objectives to identify gaps and set realistic expectations.

Organizational capacity

Consider factors like available budget, human resources, technological infrastructure, and overall operational capabilities. This allows you to focus on your existing strengths without straining resources excessively.

Prioritize Front-End Metrics

E-commerce businesses often find it tough to understand what’s causing frustration to their shoppers. Though server-side metrics offer critical insights, they share half the story. Therefore, to get the complete picture, you need to track frontend metrics that let you experience the situation from the shopper’s point of view.

For instance, when launching an e-commerce application, a drop in the Apdex score (Application Performance Index) may point to issues in performance. However, only an end-user experience strategy will share the sluggish load time issues from a new feature deployed.

  • Synthetic transactions create realistic scenarios that can monitor user paths, session lengths, and interactions.
  • Real user metrics capture page load times, rendering performance, transaction success rates, and error rates.
  • Correlate your backend infrastructure metrics with front-end performance to get a holistic picture of the situation. Thus, you will build a feedback loop between back-end and front-end development teams.

Invest in Automation for Early Error Resolution

Performance monitoring allows e-commerce teams to understand what’s going on and why—that is, to proactively prevent an error that can quickly impact revenue.

Though proactive monitoring points you in the right direction, the error resolution can take up a lot of your time and effort if done manually.

AI-driven automation cuts to the chase by easing your team off manual work, providing precise answers, and boosting productivity.

Here’s a five-step process to follow to get the most out of automation.

  • Choose a repetitive and high-volume task like anomaly detection or log analysis that needs to be automated. These tasks need to have clear patterns and minimal decision-making variability.
  • Gain deep insights into affected areas, obtain better context, and prevent issues from escalating through proactive performance monitoring.
  • Efficiently navigate incident resolution by automating remediation actions. Implement intelligent workflows that can automatically trigger actions, such as auto-scaling, service restarts, or configuration adjustments.
  • Simultaneously, establish a streamlined response system, directing issues to teams equipped with the specific expertise required for error resolution.
  • Encourage your tech and non-technical stakeholders to make sure the automation efforts align with the experience they expect.

Noibu: Your E-commerce Error Resolution Co-pilot

Noibu is an end-to-end error monitoring and resolution platform that enables you to automate your e-commerce error detection process and provides you with all the details you need to efficiently address bugs that impact the customer experience on your site and cause revenue loss.

So, if you’re looking to eliminate performance-impacting bugs on your site to optimize for conversions, reduce cart abandonment, and streamline the checkout experience, Noibu can do it all for you, improving your team’s error resolution efficiency so they can spend their bandwidth on more strategic tasks. Sign up for a free checkout audit of your website to experience how Noibu detects critical errors on your site that could be impacting conversions.

Choose a Suitable Performance Monitoring Solution

To figure out which performance monitoring tool is best for your site, consider the following:

  • Legacy products often struggle to keep up with the complexity of modern web architectures.
  • Solutions that seamlessly integrate the latest real-time, intelligent alerting capabilities.
  • Solutions that are designed or updated to help organizations meet or exceed Google Core Web Vitals standards.
  • Platforms that offer multiple types of web performance monitoring approaches, like synthetic monitoring and RUM.

Most e-commerce teams want to blend these capabilities; hence, they are better off choosing a platform offering most of the above-mentioned features.

Summing Up

With the high standards shoppers have set for e-commerce, businesses cannot afford to take their website performance lightly. Website architecture, user expectations, and online behavior are evolving continuously. So, even the smallest technical error or performance issue can significantly impact customer experience, decrease conversions, and cause a dent in your revenue.

Proactive e-commerce error detection and resolution is a critical part of optimizing your website performance. Noibu detects all site errors and offers the technical details your team needs to resolve them efficiently. Experience Noibu in action by signing up for a demo today.

Posted on June 6, 2024

Data should inform decisions, not drive them. Having a firm grasp of data science is clearly a huge plus when you’re working out how to grow an e-commerce operation, but it shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all. Can you put yourselves in the shoes of each different stakeholder, can you keep the aims, objectives, and needs of the business and customer in mind when making big decisions?

In this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox, Kailin Noivo welcomes the Director of Digital Experience at Fox Racing, Owen Spencer for a conversation that spans his career from retail to web development, to his current position. They cover his views on leadership and data, as well as his perspective on the future of the industry.

Owen Spencer on The E-commerce Toolbox

A Data-Driven or a Data-Informed Approach?

Owen has many of experience managing teams across different departments, leading them through the challenges of the ever-changing digital environment that e-commerce operates on. As a leader and someone who’s worked with a lot of different leaders, he has built up a strong idea of the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches.

Over his time in the industry – just as in most other industries – the role of data has been growing in importance. These days, companies have access to more of it than ever, and with the help of AI, are able to gather incredible amounts of information relevant to marketing campaigns, sales and e-commerce.

What you choose to do with the data you gather, and how much you let it dictate your decision-making is still down to you, however. On the show, Owen discusses having seen companies veer towards a data-driven approach that essentially eliminates the human aspect, where decisions are made strictly based on data insights.

For Owen, this overlooks the fact that the end-user is a real person themselves, and it takes some human experience, intuition, and knowledge to be able to keep that end-user in mind and make decisions that benefit them.

Comparison with Competitors: Why it Might Not Always Be a Good Idea

Owen takes a balanced view on making comparisons between your own company and rival e-commerce stores. He makes the point that it would be almost negligent not to take note of what your competitors are doing and industry trends. But beyond that, comparing yourselves to other companies can have a damaging effect on your decision-making.

Naturally, if you’re looking at what you consider to be the gold standard e-commerce store, and you see them implement some new feature, you may be tempted to have your developers start coming up with the same thing. But if you’re doing this, it means you’ve started making assumptions, which is never a good starting point to be making potentially costly decisions.

Besides the fact that the context of your company and brand is a different beast from your rivals, you don’t know anything about why they brought in that new feature. It could be based on information they have that is completely irrelevant to your business.

But even if your e-commerce company and brand are completely analogous to theirs, you’ve got no way of knowing if they even benefitted from that change. You might spend time and money bringing that onto your platform only to find out that they dumped the idea after a couple of weeks when it turned out to be a dud.

Owen’s overall angle is that, if you focus too much of your attention on comparisons and keeping up with the opposition, then you’re dooming yourself to never be a leader in the space.

Owen Spencer on comparison with competitors

The Personalized Future of E-Commerce

The long-term future of e-commerce is unpredictable just as the short-term is – this is the nature of an ever-changing industry that is constantly being shaped by new technological breakthroughs. This doesn’t mean that experts can’t make their own assessments of what the general direction of travel will look like – after all, if you do you have an internal sense of where your industry is going, and you can be well prepared to cope with the fluctuations within that.

For Owen, it’s a case of the e-commerce space moving towards a more personalized user experience, much in the same way that email marketing has shifted the same way. AI and various chatbots have made the prospect of totally personalizing the digital shopping experience more possible than ever, and Owen believes it won’t be long until an almost concierge-like experience will be the norm.

He makes the point that until now, e-commerce stores have attempted to replicate the in-store shopping experience digitally, with all the hundreds of product categories there in front of them. You arrive on the site and it’s your role to navigate through the filters before eventually arriving at the product type you want, where you can browse and make your selection. Owen’s boldest take is that in the future, there will be no navigation, but instead, you will interact with this ‘concierge’ who will discover what it is you’re looking for and bring the options to you. Instead of a medium-sized shirt, you could order the shirt that’s made precisely for you.

Listen to the Full Episode Below!

Dive into this latest fascinating episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives with Kailin Noivo and his guest, Owen Spencer, to discover more of Owen’s thoughts on the future of e-commerce, and explore his views on how best to lead your e-commerce platform to success.

👉 Apple: https://apple.co/4bIgdCA

👉 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4c1y8nq

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