Shubhi Ahluwalia, Author at Noibu

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In a Global Research Report by WP Engine, 92% of respondents shared that headless technologies make it easier to deliver a consistent content experience across channels.
Businesses leveraging headless commerce save around $1.4 billion in IT costs annually.
77% of e-commerce companies implementing headless architecture say it gives them increased agility by allowing them to quickly change their storefront.
In an international survey, 92% of respondents affirmed that headless technologies enhance customer interactions and experiences.
Research shows that 54% of the businesses leveraging APIs (a key component of headless architectures) report enhanced performance and productivity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

👉 Apple: https://apple.co/3RSpdxe

👉 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Posted on May 30, 2024

Traditional, quantitative data like the number of clicks, scrolls, bounce rate, and the number of pages viewed offer limited insights into what shoppers experience when interacting with a website. Though this data feels sufficient, it doesn’t offer an in-depth understanding of how these data points impact shopper experience.

To create exceptional experiences and convert those clicks into revenue, you need a tool that can unearth what’s not obvious.

You need session replays that offer insights into how customers are interacting with your website – what elements they are struggling with and how they are navigating through to the checkout stage. This post will share how session replay tools can help you better study customer behavior and improve their shopping experience.

What Is Session Replay?

Session replay is a technology that creates anonymized recordings of the actions taken by shoppers interacting with your website or application. These recordings help e-commerce teams assess buyer behavior by watching their mouse movements.

By watching these video-like recordings, you can identify –

What the shopper is trying to achieve?
How are they navigating the site?
When, where, and why are users getting frustrated?
What’s causing them to abandon the purchase journey?

Such insights help analyze specific user actions and site responses, equipping the team to make substantive improvements in user experience.

Simply put – session replay is a powerful qualitative research tool that offers immediate clues about the shopper’s thoughts and experiences when they use your website. The insights let them quickly reproduce and debug stability and performance issues before they impact your brand image and revenue.

How Session Replays Work

Session replays captures and stores user interaction data using the DOM (Document Object Model) technology which is the backend foundation of your store. The assets (design elements) in the DOM are the background elements you see in the theatre – curtains, lights, and props, whereas, the events are the actors (users) saying their lines, performing the act, and telling you the ‘story.’

The DOM is an interface that translates the web document elements into objects that programs can work on.

It is the physical structure (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) governing how your website is constructed, looks, and behaves.
It represents all the elements of the web page – images, text, buttons, and links – as a collection of nodes or objects.
DOM governs what your users see on the browser and the underlying HTML code to create a tree-like structure of the HTML elements.

For instance –

The element <head> could offshoot to <title>, <style>, and <link>

The element <body> can branch to <img> and <link> assets

What Session Replays Do

Session replay notes each change made to the DOM as an event. This could be the user clicking on a link, entering information, or retrieving data from your website.

Next, it strings these events into a representation of the user’s session. It renders the events into visual playbacks of the session. During the playback, the data is rendered such that the analyst can quickly spot and fix issues or bugs causing shopper frustration.

The data could be in the form of timestamps, the element of the page being interacted with, and the specific actions performed by the user.

What Do Session Replays Log?

Depending on the tool you use, session replays can capture a variety of events. Since websites are quite complex in the way they are built, not all session replay tools can record everything.

Here’s what session replays can record –

Assets like HTML, CSS, images, and the basic web page and app elements
CSS animations
Vector graphics and animations
Hover cursors and effects
Embedded <iframe>
Script-modified input values
Form submissions
Window resizes
AJAX URL navigation
HTML5 <audio> and <video> playback
Multi-touch events (on mobiles)
Web components
And more

Significance of Session Replays - Why Watch Them?

Session replays add a qualitative lens to your analytics, allowing your team to assess how, when, and where users encounter friction. Thus, you can quickly spot where your shoppers hesitate, get stuck, or abandon the store during their purchase journey.

Here’s why you should invest your time watching these user sessions unfold.

See how buyers navigate your store

Can they find the products they need easily?
Are they following the buyer path you predicted or planned?
Which elements are causing friction, causing users to hesitate, or making them drop off?

See how buyers interact with the elements of your page

Do they scroll to the bottom of the page?
Are the buttons placed in optimal positions on the page?
Are shoppers engaging with or ignoring product recommendations?

See where buyers are getting stuck

Are there any confusing static elements of your landing pages?
Are there broken links, buttons, or CTAs your team isn’t aware of?
Are shoppers rage-clicking at a certain spot before they abandon the page?

By providing you with answers to these questions, session replays:

Improve your understanding of user pain points. Understanding user experience drives empathy, leading to quick resolution of the issue.
Offer clear evidence of the function issue. They help you take prompt action while reducing the back-and-forth between customers and the support teams.
Add context to your analytics. Tools like Google Analytics lack details on what the buyer is doing or experiencing. Replays add context to why you are experiencing high bounce rates or cart abandonment.

The result?

Spot issues and bugs on the go. The faster you spot issues, the faster you can resolve them. Session replays ensure faster mean time to resolution (MTTR) and debugging.
Determine the source of errors. Session replays drill down to the source of the errors impacting e-commerce revenue. Your team can promptly trace errors back to features or code and address the root cause.
Identify patterns. Is it a one-off issue or a pattern? Session replays can show you the difference.
Optimize conversion rates and boost revenue. Are buyers losing interest? Are they struggling to spot the page elements? Is the CTA ineffective? Session replays make it possible to observe and resolve the optimization issues.

Who Can Benefit from Session Replay Tools

Everyone in your team responsible for optimizing conversion funnels and customer experience as well as addressing disruptions in the user journeys can benefit from session replays.

E-ommerce Developers

Session replay allows the development team to identify the root cause of an issue or bug that impacts UX and revenue.

With session replay, bug reproduction is as simple as finding sessions containing errors. When integrated with customer support tools, user bug reports can be connected to session recordings, thus eliminating the need to reproduce the bug through trial and error. This saves a lot of developer time spent decoding user-reported bugs.

Tech Support Teams

Support teams no longer need to rely on the asynchronous communication with customers and the little details they provide to troubleshoot. Session replays offer the relevant details, allowing them to understand exactly what happened and spend less time asking questions. A few tools allow support teams to skip forward or backward in the playback. This makes it easy to rewatch key events to spot an issue.

Product Managers

Product managers can watch session replays to –

See exactly where users lost interest in the page or what frustrates them
Spot elements that drove them away (intrusive pop-ups or complex menus)
Visualize the user journey
Enhance features that drive conversions
Identify potential improvement opportunities
Inform their strategic roadmap

UX Designers

Session replays help UX/UI designers and researchers identify usability issues, user struggles, and patterns in user behavior. The insights derived can be used to refine the user interface, simplify user workflows, and improve the overall user experience. It can also inform the construction of A/B tests for the placement of important elements on the page.

E-commerce Marketers

Marketers can optimize their strategies and campaigns using the insights derived from session replays. Thus, they can design attractive experiences and improve conversion rates and ROI across the funnel.

How Noibu Leverages Session Replays to Empower E-commerce Teams to Improve Their Error Resolution Efficiency

Noibu leverages session replays to help developers quickly pinpoint the root cause of website errors and correlate customer complaints to actual user sessions, so your team doesn’t spend time investigating every error to understand where and how it occurred.

The Sessions Highlight tab offers a curated list of short segments from recorded sessions, each highlighting the critical moments of the error you are reviewing. These replays allow you to find evidence of the issues impacting CX and revenue.

You can filter sessions by conditions. Each row lists the session’s date, symptoms, friction factor, browser, operating system, and last funnel step.

The Playback tab is where you can get a unique insight into the customer experience through session videos. You can identify the step, field, button, or process that triggers the error and examine your user logs and source code to uncover the cause of the error.

The Playback tab has two parts –

Session Player – Here, you can watch a customer session and see how errors impacted their journey through mouse movements on screen.

Session Timeline – It captures every event in the session video with timestamps for major actions. You will also find critical details about the session recording, including the friction factor, operating system, browser, and browser version.

Noibu’s unified platform seamlessly integrates Session Replay data with other error information so you can easily debug high-priority issues using the additional context. The error detection and resolution platform helps you make the most of session replays, thereby streamlining the error monitoring workflow – addressing errors pointed out in customer complaints with agility.

Summing Up

Session replay is a comprehensive framework that lets e-commerce teams combine quantitative and qualitative data for a 360º understanding of buyer behavior. The insights derived are instrumental in optimizing the buyer funnel, improving shopping experiences, and boosting conversion rates. It helps to identify areas of concern and offers a sure-fire way to address the root cause of issues ruining your revenue.

To prevent revenue loss due to e-commerce errors, leverage Noibu’s error monitoring platform that detects and helps you efficiently address high-priority website bugs by making the most of session replays to provide a sneak peek into the customer journey. That way, you have all the context you need to debug revenue-impacting errors without replying on customers to share the issues they faced on your site.

Posted on May 29, 2024

As e-commerce continues to evolve, so too does the role of product manager. With this in mind, how do product managers keep ahead of industry developments, build trust in their brand, and ensure seamless cross-functional collaboration?

In the latest episode of The E-commerce Toolbox, Kailin Noivo welcomes former Head of Product at Wayfair, Emily Levada who’s recently started a new role as a Sr. Director, Consumer Product at Babylist for a discussion on her experience as a Product Manager in e-commerce.

Emily shares insights into the trust equation, and its role both within organizations and in brand-customer relationships, how to handle rapid scaling, and the tensions product managers have to resolve.

What is the Trust Equation and Why is it Important for E-commerce Product Managers?

Building trust with customers has become more important than ever for e-commerce businesses. It is the foundation upon which successful products are built, and it plays a crucial role in attracting and retaining customers.

When customers trust an e-commerce platform, they are more likely to make a purchase and become loyal users. This is where the ‘trust equation’ comes in.

The Trust Equation comes from a book called The Trusted Advisor by David Masters, Charles Green, and David Masters. It is a framework that helps people understand what trust is made up of, splitting it into four components that are easily applicable to e-commerce:

– Credibility: In short, does the business know what they’re talking about?

– Reliability: Does the business do what they say they will do? Emily cites the ‘say/do ratio’ as an important part of reliability.

– Discretion: Emily boils this idea down to whether customers can trust a business with their emotions or secrets, whether that’s data, personal information, or buying habits.

– Self-orientation: Does the business have the customers’ best interest at heart?

The reason the trust equation is particularly useful to e-commerce businesses is that it’s easy to get feedback based on credibility, reliability, discretion, and self-orientation.

Customers vote with their feet, and businesses lacking in any part of the trust equation will soon suffer. Emily says that what that feedback cycle helps businesses to do is understand what behaviors are adding to or subtracting from trust in the organization.

Emily recommends teaching the trust equation to employees and giving feedback to them based on the trust equation. What this does is encouraging them to implement behaviors and actions that increase trust in the organization, and discouraging them from taking actions and engaging in behaviors that decrease trust in the organization. The trust equation is simple. It makes building trust into something that can be accomplished in the normal course of business.

Cross-Functional Collaboration In Remote and Hybrid Work Environments

One of the roles of a product manager is to make the experience as seamless as possible for vendors and those in your organization. In a sense, the work of a good product manager should be invisible!

For instance, as Emily says:

“Your customer isn’t buying your checkout experience.”

The customer is buying a product that you’re selling, and your ability to help them understand that product, select a product, feel confident in that purchase—especially if it’s a high-value purchase—is of vital importance. Emily uses the example of standardized crib sizes.

The reason this is important at Emily’s company, Wayfair, is due to their high average order values, returns are very hard for large goods. By ensuring a seamless ordering process, Wayfair is able to save money, as well as build trust with customers.

Listen to the Full Episode Below!

Tune in to this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives with Emily Levada and Kailin Noivo to learn more about how the roles of project managers are changing, and the ways they can keep ahead of developments.

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Posted on May 24, 2024

Lego is quite popular among kids and adults alike because of the immense freedom it offers to creators. The composable parts offer unlimited scope for creativity.

Imagine applying these composable principles to digital commerce. The effects can be truly game-changing.

The modern online shopper expects personalized and consistent experiences, regardless of where they shop. However, when adding a new technology to their commerce solution, achieving speed to market while reducing the complexities is a challenge.

A recent survey report revealed the top challenges faced by e-commerce leaders today. Composable commerce allows e-commerce companies to create differentiated digital experiences, improve customer satisfaction, make incremental changes (minus a complete overhaul), and improve speed to market.

What is Composable Commerce?

Composable commerce is a component-based e-commerce solution design approach that gives retailers flexibility and freedom to build outstanding shopping experiences.

It includes the headless approach where the back end is broken down into packaged business capabilities (PBCs) that can be ‘composed’ together. The back-end capabilities are accessed by the front end, using APIs.

Each PBC is an application feature and an aggregated set of microservices. For instance, the cart and checkout PBC has microservices like cart microservice and ordering microservice.

Similarly, the promotions PBC will have the promotions microservice.

The composable commerce architecture seamlessly combines the three core traits shared below to maximize flexibility, enabling e-commerce brands to create innovative customer experiences across all channels.

Cloud-native: All the functionalities are natively integrated with major cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud, thereby reducing the maintenance cost, achieving scalability, and reducing time to value.

Component-based: It combines independent and interchangeable components (PBCs) or building blocks that can be added, dropped, or replaced. For instance, the product search, shopping cart, and checkout work together through API. Since these components are independent, you can effortlessly plug or unplug them as per your needs.

Tech-agnostic: The business isn’t bound to a proprietary technology. You can select, code, integrate, and manage applications without the need for new languages, specific technology, or certifications. Thus, you can expand your technology stack by upskilling your current talent pool.

Difference between Traditional, Headless, and Composable Commerce

Traditional Commerce

Traditional commerce (monolithic) is a conventional architectural approach where the front end (presentation layer), the back end (business logic), and the database are combined.

The traditional commerce platforms are built on a single code base; hence, you cannot isolate any change or deployment to a certain part of the application. As a result, changes need to be deployed to the entire application. Moreover, since the entire application is hosted on the same infrastructure and server, scaling up or down has to be applied to the entire application. This makes monolithic commerce rigid.

Thus, most e-commerce firms have moved to headless and composable commerce architectures, which use an adaptable and modular approach.

Headless Commerce

Just like a headless content management system allows stores to update pages across multiple platforms, headless commerce simplifies information exchanges between systems (front end and back end) and different channels.

Headless commerce involves decoupling the front-end presentation layer from the back-end platform. Since these are separate, they are managed and updated independently, allowing greater flexibility and delivering improved shopping experiences.

Thus, if a retailer needs to connect their store to a PIM ( Product Information Management) or rethink their online journey, they can do it without impacting the entire system.

If you want to learn more about headless commerce, read our detailed post on the subject.

Composable Commerce

Composable commerce takes this to the next level by allowing e-commerce companies to build a website based on high-performance and recognized technology components that integrate easily with each other. It is built on the concept of flexibility and composability.

It enables teams to create and optimize experiences through MACH (microservices, APIs, cloud, and headless) and JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) architectures.

For instance, you can leverage the MACH architecture for the back end and JAMstack for the front end to build a flexible solution that meets current and future e-commerce needs.

How Composable Commerce Benefits Your E-Commerce Website

Composable commerce can transform large e-commerce processes and overall performance. No wonder, 72% of US retailers have already adopted it.

Let’s look at the reason for this popularity –

Increased agility

Composable solutions offer a flexible environment to help large e-commerce businesses like yours to pivot, switch gears, and deliver exceptional experiences without heavily relying on IT. So, you can change a component, without impacting the platform. With modular iterations, you can add, remove, or switch functionalities, innovate faster, and improve shopper experiences on the fly. You can release new features up to 8X faster than monolith systems.

Unlimited flexibility

You can manage every aspect of e-commerce operations by assembling composable commerce stacks. The customized stacks aid in refining and polishing the front-end experiences and improve how the business operates from the back end.

Infinite scalability

The agile nature of composable commerce allows large e-commerce businesses to manage multiple brands, explore new markets and channels, and try new business models.

You can quickly scale the experiences that resonate with customers. This autoscaling helps you respond to new influxes of traffic and customers in real time. This is especially relevant for those Black Friday moments when the demand is high.

Quicker time to market

With composable commerce, you can update their features on the go. The straightforward integrations allow large e-commerce companies to stay on top of trends and ever-changing customer demands.

Lower total cost of ownership (TCO)

While initial costs associated with composable might be higher, it is actually less expensive than a monolithic architecture which is often subject to vendor lock-ins – meaning, the business is bound by a contract for a fixed period. Switching vendors is pricey and complex. Plus, with composable commerce, you identify and choose solutions that fit your business requirements.

How Is Composable Commerce Related to M.A.C.H and JAMstack?

Moving towards the MACH and JAMstack architecture allows you to benefit from the composable commerce approach.

Let’s see how these are connected.

MACH Architecture

Microservices: This enables the composability of PBCs that can be deployed independently.

API-first: All the functionality is accessed through APIs; hence, you can tie two or more services or applications together.

Cloud-native: As shared earlier, cloud-native capabilities ensure scalability and flexibility across the application.

Headless: The decoupling ensures continuous improvement of the user interface.

An easy way to understand this is that MACH enables composability on the backend while JAMstack achieves this at the front end.

JAMstack Architecture

Like MACH, the JAMstack development approach circles around composability through –

JavaScript
APIs
Markup

Here, the UI is decoupled from the back-end services, and the pre-rendered statics website is served through the CDN in markup. This works on the client side, unlike monolithic architecture where the back end is busy handling user requests.

Thus, the resources consumed to serve a webpage are less. Applying MACH and JAMstack together enables fast-loading static web pages served by an array of lean and replaceable PCBs.

When Not to Combine MACH and JAMstack

Your composable commerce solution features dynamic pages (static pages only since you are using JAMstack)
You have non-technical user experiences via intuitive UI (in JAMstack they will have to interact with markup)
Most composable commerce solutions are to be accessed by mobile devices. In such a case, pushing everything to the client side can drain device resources.

Key Considerations When Leveraging Composable

Be prepared to manage complexities

Composable e-commerce includes integrating various microservices, third-party components, and APIs that can make the process complex. This is especially true when managing multiple vendors.

Hence, to navigate the diverse ecosystem of components you must have the needed technical expertise and resources. Your e-commerce team should be well-equipped with e-commerce tools, cloud-native technologies, DevOps, and API management.

You would need a strong in-house development capability and the ability to house the solution architecture that includes –

A dedicated solution architect
A hands-on CTO
A senior lead developer who can code and own the solution architecture

Having a dedicated team allows you to be more agile.

Flexibility can be a double-edged sword

Though composability allows online retailers to create separate microservices for all new functions and on different infrastructures, it can lead to technical debt being carried by the entire stack. Hence, it is important to standardize the approach with a bias to standard language, framework, and infrastructure and deviate only where needed.

Take a holistic approach

Moving to composable architecture will inevitably lead to significant changes across the company. Yet, most e-commerce companies consider only the technical side of enabling composable commerce.

What they miss is the significant non-technical component that they must navigate. To realize the full potential of this transformation, retailers must think holistically. They must opt for a suitable partner who can holistically address potential challenges from multiple dimensions.

Implementing Composable Commerce for Your Business

Let’s dive into the practical aspects of composable commerce.

Understand your business needs

Begin by evaluating whether or not your business needs composable commerce. Start by assessing your business requirements.

Is your e-commerce business looking to enhance its business model and process flexibility?
Are you looking to take your customer experiences to the next level and drive scalability?
Do you want to future-proof your operations?

Next, assess your tech maturity.

Do you aim to gain complete control of your deployments?
Is your team prepared to implement and maintain several solutions?
Do you have the team with the technical skills required to execute a project?

Evaluating your priorities and tech maturity will guide you through the decision.

Prepare your team for the transformation

Start with the cornerstone – MACH architecture. Brief your team about the digital transformation and aim for close collaboration with your development team and the IT department.

Next, map your development tools and API documentation. Prepare for customization of the tech stack and add best-of-breed components for your e-commerce.

Introduce composable commerce in phases

Moving to composable commerce comes with risks. To mitigate the risks and ensure a seamless transition, take it step by step. Identify your priorities. For instance, if optimizing your order processing and fulfillment comes first, start by implementing an Order Management System (OMS). Roll out changes in stages and test capabilities while gathering feedback at each stage. Refine the software components based on new technologies and customer feedback.

Evaluate your composable commerce solution providers

If you search the term on Google, you will get a long list of composable commerce platforms, each claiming to be the best. Look beyond marketing buzzwords. Research the technological capabilities, scalability, and flexibility of each commerce platform. Here’s a quick checklist to consider –

Summing Up

We appreciate the creative freedom a stack of Legos offers – the power to rip and replace the course brick by brick. Applying these design principles to e-commerce can help your business innovate and integrate new technology quickly and easily.

However, going the composable way doesn’t come without challenges. Ultimately, the decision should be based on several considerations, such as your company’s tech expertise and maturity, the project complexity, scalability requirements, and agility needs. It is critical to evaluate the benefits and trade-offs before going ahead.

Regardless of the architecture you choose, Noibu can be your e-commerce co-pilot in ensuring your customer journeys are frictionless. The e-commerce error detection and resolution platform detects 100% of errors and allows you to prioritize them based on business impact. Thus, you can resolve the issues ruining your revenue instantly.

For more interesting insights that can transform your e-commerce business, visit Noibu’s blog. We share practical industry insights and are your ally in e-commerce error detection and resolution.

Posted on May 22, 2024

Every retailer inevitably faces the decision of whether to use a monolithic commerce platform or opt for a composable approach, but with pros and cons to both, it can be hard to determine which is right for you.

In this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives, host Kailin Noivo is joined by Steve Holsinger, Chief Salesforce Architect at full-service digital agency DEPT. Together, they explore the differences between composable and headless commerce and discuss the reasons someone might opt to use a composable approach, drawing on examples from DEPT’s customer base.

What is Composable Commerce?

A monolithic platform has it all. There’s a promotion engine, catalog management, and customer management all built into the platform, alongside the experience layer.

Composable commerce offers a more flexible option, allowing you access to all these parts of the monolithic platform without forcing you to stick to them all. Instead, you can look at the ecosystem and find the right fit for your business. For example, maybe the built-in promotion engine doesn’t quite fit the bill.

By taking a composable approach, you can instead find an external engine that you can integrate into your system. Instead of starting from a big foundation, you identify the key players required in your ecosystem and build around them, with the expectation that as tech evolves and your business grows, you can replace components with the best in the market.

Headless commerce, on the other hand, is one particular way of composing your experience. Within this, you have a clear separation between the experience layer and the systems that drive it. This means you may have a monolithic platform underneath, with composable aspects added on top.

Why Choose Composable?

From witnessing some of DEPT’s customers choosing to opt for a composable model, Steve is clear that you need to have a business-based reason for doing so.

The KPIs he has seen drive that decision are often speed and performance. The idea behind this is that if you can improve speed and performance, then you can achieve a higher conversion rate.

For some of DEPT’s customers, Steve has witnessed a one second decrease in page load time yielding a 25% increase in conversion. Another factor to consider is whether your business goals can be appropriately addressed by a monolithic platform.

For example, if you were offering a bespoke service, you may find that your existing platform has too many constraints to allow you to achieve the experience you want to give each of your customers.

How Should You Maintain Your Platform?

No matter whether you are using a monolithic or composable platform, at some point you will face the decision of whether you build and maintain it yourself, or whether you should outsource it to systems integrators (SIs) and specialists.

Steve advises that, unless you have a strong software engineering business unit that has a rigorous process, then you should engage with an external SI. Building and maintaining your platform is a very intensive process, involving many moving parts, and if it’s not built in the right way, it won’t deliver the right results.

Once the platform is built, you then face issues surrounding the maintenance of it. Often, if the person who built it is not maintaining it, you will face a knowledge gap that will cause downstream impacts. Of course, with strong product team members, this will be less likely, but ultimately you need strong communications of important documentation.

If an SI works with you to build the experience, part of their service should be to produce the appropriate documentation to allow your team to support it. Steve recommends steering clear of any companies that don’t offer that as standard.

Listen to the Full Episode Below!

Tune in to this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives with Steve Holsinger and Kailin Noivo to learn more about composable and headless commerce.

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Posted on May 16, 2024

The fashion world is changing, so how can brands stay competitive when faced with the influx of promotion-heavy competition?

In this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives, host Kailin Noivo is joined by Phil Clark, Senior Director of Digital Marketing and Media at Canada Goose. Together, they explore how the luxury fashion brand maintains competitive advantage in the current fashion market, measure the right KPIs, personalize experiences, and leverage social commerce and influencer marketing.

Maintaining a Competitive Edge

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the fashion industry has been overwhelmed by an influx of fast fashion brands offering promotions almost every day on almost every product. Not only has this trend reduced the impact of events like Black Friday, it has made it increasingly more difficult for luxury brands like Canada Goose to stand out from the crowd.

They rarely, if ever, offer promotions, and so they cannot rely on competitive pricing to gain traction in the market. Instead, they focus their efforts on three main strategies: dynamic targeting, relevant messaging, and digital placements that allow for storytelling.

These strategies allow them to engage with customers where they are at, putting the brand front and center.
However, as the market is constantly changing, they have to keep testing their strategies and products to ensure they are getting the best ROI possible. This is the only way they can maintain their competitive advantage.

The key to testing is to measure the right KPIs. Phil explains, “It doesn’t feel like the sexy stuff, but it is the most important thing to ensure that we’re measuring the right KPIs and we’re using the right sources and the right models.”

Their main approach is to use an MMM (media/marketing mixed model) to understand the value of their offline media and brand building. They then do incremental testing on these insights to validate the MMM and understand what KPIs make a difference on a regular basis. Following that, they adjust their media mix to ensure it is maximizing their revenue.

The Power of Personalization

Every e-commerce brand is striving for one thing: personalized experiences for every customer. To Phil, the key to this is effectively leveraging first-party data.

At Canada Goose, they use first-party data to segment their customers into groups based on purchase behavior, interests, timelines, and life cycle. Through doing so they can personalize the experience at every touch point, communicating the products that are relevant to each customer in both online and offline experiences. They use some AI for this, but maintain a human approach to fully understand their consumers.

Social Commerce and Influencer Marketing

In recent years, social commerce and influencer marketing have increased in popularity, with platforms like Instagram and TikTok now offering direct commerce options.

Although Canada Goose now has a greater retail footprint than e-commerce, it used to be the opposite, and they still maintain the same approach: creating a frictionless journey, whether that be on their website or on social media, and they will continue to take this approach when working with influencers.

Consumer attitudes towards influencers are changing, and so they are only working with those that can connect with customers in an authentic way. This way they will avoid losing their brand integrity but will still benefit from the advantages of partnering with influencers.

“The younger, more tech savvy consumer is really becoming aware of a glossed over facade of some influences and ensuring that we’re curating and working with really authentic influencers to maximize that connection with our consumers is very important.”

Listen to the Full Episode Below!

Tune in to this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives with Phil Clark and Kailin Noivo to learn more about staying competitive in the fast fashion market.

👉 Apple: https://apple.co/44HHZwk

👉 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3yfxR1E

Posted on May 15, 2024

If statistics are anything to go by, e-commerce is projected to surpass $8 trillion by 2027 and get cluttered. Online retailers recognize that to differentiate in such a scenario, they need to build and maintain a scalable and robust online store.

The platform on which the site is built acts as the foundation of a brand’s online presence. And in order to scale and meet growing consumer demand, you need a platform that is also scalable, flexible, and robust.

This is where the big decision of e-commece replatforming comes in.

Replatforming is considered central to improving scalability, flexibility, and functionality. 46% of online retailers see replatforming as a priority as per Digital Commerce 360’s 2023 Leading Vendors Report.

Yet, e-commerce replatforming is easier said than done. The process is tricky and often attracts unpleasant surprises.

This post highlights the risks of considering e-commerce replatforming and when and why you should make the switch.

But first, let’s quickly go over the basics.

What Is E-commerce Replatforming?

It’s the process of moving an online store from one platform to another. It involves transferring customer information, product data, and order histories, redesigning the site layout, reconfiguring services, and training staff to use the new system.

Although a complex and time-consuming process, this option is necessary for e-retailers to decrease maintenance costs, deliver superior e-commerce customer experience, and enhance sales opportunities.

When Should You Consider Replatforming?

Replatforming essentially involves taking advantage of new technologies that can help your business grow and boost customer experience.

But how do you know when to take the plunge? After all, it is a big decision that involves several risks.

Look out for these key signs to determine if your e-commerce store needs replatforming.

When considering replatforming, assess its strategic business and technological merits thoroughly. Here are a few points to consider –

Scalability

Evaluate whether replatforming will enhance scalability to handle increasing traffic and transactions without performance losses.

Integration capabilities

If your current e-commerce platform limits growth or integration with necessary tools, it may be time to switch. With the new platform, you should be able to integrate more advanced features for custom merchandising, promotions, and recommendations and attract greater sales opportunities.

Features

The platform you choose should offer superior security features and compliance capabilities, particularly if your industry faces strict regulatory changes or if you plan to operate in countries like the UK and EU where adhering to data regulations is important.

CX improvements

Consider the customer experience improvements and new features the new platform can deliver, such as personalized interactions (e.g., localization), efficient mobile optimization, and faster page load speeds.

Potential ROI

Before deciding, quantify the potential ROI and develop a clear implementation roadmap. Ask yourself, “Does my online store need to switch platforms?” “Are my customers and sales suffering because my store is unable to deliver a favorable shopping experience?”

Take a step back and think whether undertaking this months-long activity is worth the effort. Moving away from legacy systems into an API-first e-commerce architecture to improve customer experience is a wise decision.

However, when considering the switch it is essential to consider the what, why, and when of the decision. Jorge Ramirez, the Global Head of e-commerce and Digital Marketing at Joma Sport shares interesting insights on how you should make this decision.

Check out what the e-commerce expert has to share about e-commerce replatforming in our detailed post –

Jorge Ramirez’s take on e-commerce replatforming

Listen to the full podcast episode where Jorge talks in depth about replatforming here –

👉 Apple: https://apple.co/49Mu1ek

👉 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/43hH0Cz

E-commerce Replatforming: Risks to Be Aware Of

The mere idea of replatforming ecommerce sends shivers down the spine because of the risks involved. But when done right, e-commerce replatforming is rewarding. All you need is proper planning and thoughtful execution to avoid the risks mentioned below.

Budget overruns

The longer you take to finish the replatforming task, the more financial investments it involves.

Delays during e-commerce replatforming can be caused by many factors, including project scope creep, poor vendor performance, insufficient testing coverage, unexpected data loss, and integration complexity—all of which could overrun the initial budget you estimated.

To avoid this scenario:

Create a schedule for replatforming and include a buffer period to deal with unexpected problems. Set aside a percentage of the original budget to resolve issues causing delays.
Measure the actual progress against projected progress. Are you able to deliver every milestone deadline? If not, what’s causing the problem, and what are you doing to correct the deviation?
Let your stakeholders know of even the most minute changes in your progress. Recording the process closely and noting new requirements and problems will make it easier to justify additional expenses.

Technical issues related to HTTPS implementation

One of the major reasons for e-commerce replatforming is ensuring security. Plus, HTTPS signals to Google ensure that your online store is secure, so it automatically gets considered for higher rankings.

However, an HTTP to an HTTPS migration can go wrong.

Modern browsers alert users if they’re about to access a non-secure HTTP page, which can stop them from proceeding. Without proper redirects, the SEO value of the old HTTP pages may also not transfer to the HTTPS pages.

Here’s how to prevent such technical issues:

Run an internal link audit to ensure your canonical tags, hreflang, and other internal links (content, headers, footers, and navigational elements) point to HTTPS instead of HTTP.
Submit your new HTTPS sitemap to Google so that it can crawl and index your new URLs more quickly.
Use 301 redirects to ensure older URLs are mapped to their new counterparts.

Poor integration with third-party tools

During replatforming, you may transfer existing system integrations with third-party apps, CRM systems, supply management software, and accounting tools to your new online store.

This step, if not supervised, can cause inconsistencies in customer data, inventory levels, and financial records.

In fact, 84% of companies claim integration challenges slow down digital transformation progress.

There are also cost implications, such as having to budget for setting up a new API if your new e-commerce platform doesn’t allow smooth integration for continually using the existing tools.

If you are wondering how to prepare for migrating your e-commerce, we have a few quick tips for you –

Ensure the platform offers robust and well-documented APIs facilitating easy integration with other systems.
Consider using an integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) solution, which can act as middleware to connect disparate systems without extensive custom coding.
Leverage pre-built connectors if available, as they can reduce the complexity and time required for integration to a great extent.

Loss of data due to migration

Data migration is a critical part of the e-commerce replatforming process. If you aren’t careful, vital data, such as customer and vendor information, transaction histories, and product details, could get lost.

Moreover, data might not match if the formats aren’t aligned, leading to duplications or inconsistent records. Data sets can become corrupted due to compatibility issues between old and new e-commerce platforms.

For a quick resolution regarding data migration:

Cleanse the data to remove inaccuracies, duplicates, and incomplete records.
Set up rules and checks to ensure data integrity throughout the e-commerce migration process.
Clearly define how each data type is mapped from the old platform to the new one.

Disruptions to website functionality

Transferring online operations to a new e-commerce platform leads to three major disruptive issues that impact website functionality.

Traffic loss

Surfing the web remains the most popular way for customers to discover new products. Since e-commerce replatforming involves altering URL structures and links, a negative impact on SEO rankings and the issue of inadequate redirects from old pages to new ones are inevitable.

Here’s how you can control traffic loss when moving from your current e-commerce platform:

Remove duplicated content and implement canonical tags to maintain SEO value.
Keep track of 404 errors and fix URL tags wherever necessary.

Lost sales opportunities

Replatforming is a time-consuming process, which means your online store could suffer from broken links, checkout issues, and slow site speed and performance, leading to abandoned carts and lost sales.

To avoid these problems, keep using the older website until your new one is ready or re-platform during low-load periods or off-season.

Design changes

Not everyone likes change. Moving to the right e-commerce platform often involves designing your website, which can disorient returning customers or cause usability.

To minimize the impact of such changes:

Create a user interface that enhances customer journeys rather than aesthetic changes.
Compare elements of the new design against the old to measure the impact on conversions; make changes based on these insights.

Scalability concerns

The objective of switching to a new e-commerce platform is to deliver a high-level customer experience.

The purpose, however, gets defeated if you choose the wrong platform, which doesn’t align with the technical demands of your business and stifles innovation and responsiveness. Non-scalable platforms also increase higher operational costs.

Here’s how you can avoid this problem:

Ensure the platform architecture supports performance optimization techniques such as caching, content delivery networks (CDN), and database optimization.
Enable dynamic scaling based on real-time demands, such as auto-scaling server resources.
Consider options like database sharding or clustering to distribute server loads as data grows.

Negative impact on user experience

E-commerce replatforming often involves a steep learning curve. The backend environment may be more complex and configured differently than you’re accustomed to.

Plus, immediately after migration, the workload for administrative tasks may increase. This can be due to the need to fix bugs and errors arising from the transfer, which could be as simple as visual glitches in the checkout process, user login, or site navigation.

Even if the new platform offers enhanced features, changing layout, navigation, or functionality can disrupt the shopping experience for returning customers familiar with the old site’s interface.

So, how do you minimize the impact on user experience?

Conduct thorough training sessions for all team members involved in backend operations. Focus on the specific functionalities of the new platform.
Create mechanisms to receive and incorporate feedback from users (both internal and external). This can help you leverage data-driven customer experience insights to make strategic decisions for your online store.
Before going live, conduct extensive testing of the new platform. Include functional, performance, and user acceptance testing to detect and fix bugs.

Moving to a new e-commerce platform is quite complex. is quite complex. Hence, you need a strategic approach right from assessing your current website to opting for the right e-commerce platform, and testing and QA are all critical components of the process.

Regardless of how carefully you plan the process, completely avoiding website errors, bugs, and technical glitches is tough. These hit unexpectedly, causing businesses millions of dollars in lost revenue.

For most e-commerce teams, knowing where to start and which issues to prioritize can be challenging.

Noibu’s robust e-commerce error monitoring platform detects and flags website errors in real time and calculates their impact on revenue, allowing you to prioritize the most critical errors. The platform offers in-depth technical details your developers need to quickly resolve high-priority errors without having to replicate them or spend hours investigating.

You can simply sort through the detected issues on the Noibu console and determine which needs immediate attention and which can be put off or dismissed altogether, as the tool also contextualizes revenue and user impact.

Sign up for a demo today to experience how Noibu helps eliminate revenue-impacting bugs on your online store, regardless of the platform it is built on.

Eliminate Risk While Replatforming Your E-commerce Website

Being realistic during the e-commerce replatforming can help you avoid several website mistakes usually made in the process.

You can engage stakeholders early and seek expert advice to align the move with your long-term business objectives, ensuring it drives real value and supports sustained growth.

Of course, you’ll have Noibu to rely on during this process. The tool helps you prioritize errors based on revenue impact and delivers reproduction details so you can get cracking on fixing the issues detected, without getting overwhelmed. If you’re moving out of your existing e-commerce platform and want to uncover errors that may impact revenue get started with a free checkout audit now!