Error Detection: The Secret Ingredient for Successful Ecommerce

Ecommerce moves quickly. Sales are won or lost in a matter of seconds. Any friction makes a customer reconsider a purchase or go to another store to buy what they’re searching for. That’s why providing a smooth, error-free customer experience is crucial for success.

However, many businesses overlook a critical component that can make or break their ecommerce business: error detection. Errors cause unnecessary friction and can spiral from a problem that may have an easy fix into stunted growth over the long-term.

The impact of ecommerce errors

Ecommerce errors happen for many reasons, from broken links, fetch errors, shopping cart glitches, and third-party integration failures. While thorough testing helps eliminate many errors before they occur, it’s impossible to foresee every issue that may arise because the complexity of ecommerce websites and the platforms they’re built on continues to grow. The inescapable truth is that if you sell online for long enough, you will encounter errors at some point.

When errors occur, they can be devastating. Research shows that after just one bad experience, 32% of customers will never return to the store. Beyond these lost customers, 79% are less likely to purchase from a site again if they experience performance issues, diminishing the chances of both first and repeat purchases. 

It’s even costlier when errors aren’t detected quickly because they grow in impact over time and cut into revenue. This makes it mission-critical to mitigate errors when they occur and to find solutions that detect and prevent them. For example, the cost of poor software code quality in the US has grown to at least $2.41 trillion, which is 90% more than the country’s national budget deficit. Costs to fix errors very quickly spiral, with IBM noting that fixing a bug during implementation is six times more expensive than fixing it in the design phase, and up to 15 times more expensive than fixing it in testing. 

Even major ecommerce platforms aren’t immune to these issues. In 2018, Amazon's Prime Day was marred by technical glitches that prevented customers from checking out. It was overwhelmed by a surge in site traffic, causing error messages that lasted for around two hours and resulted in an estimated $72.4 to $99 million in lost sales.

Similarly, eBay shoppers faced major issues with checking out due to a bug in February 2023, which impacted sales and led to a rise in customer complaints. A bug triggered when someone changed their shipping address, which led to an error message that blocked a customer’s ability to request the total cost and proceed to purchase.

Strategies for effective error detection

If errors can happen to ecommerce companies at that size, it can happen to anyone. To effectively combat errors, ecommerce companies should implement a comprehensive error detection strategy encompassing these four key elements:

• Monitor your ecommerce website(s)

While errors reported by customers and through support tickets are important, they often provide limited, incomplete information instead of the full picture. That’s why it’s important to implement comprehensive monitoring tools that track user interactions and key performance metrics such as uptime, page load times, and server responses, including when there’s a sudden surge in traffic. 

To gain a better sense of what may go wrong, it’s useful to complement real-user monitoring with synthetic monitoring, which uses simulation or scripted recordings to create behavioral paths that reproduce the end-user experience and identify critical bottlenecks that could potentially be leading to downtime. Once you have a sense of the state of your ecommerce site, set up alerts for specific error types or performance thresholds.

• Detect errors in real-time

In addition to monitoring your site holistically, you will want to specifically monitor for errors. It’s crucial to identify errors as they occur and using a solution that offers real-time monitoring will help you move faster, without relying on slow, manual processes or testing phases that don’t capture what’s currently happening. 

Look for tools that can pinpoint revenue and conversion errors, funnel step issues, and enable you to examine the last step a user took that led to those issues. 

• Drill down into sessions

Beyond looking at the last step before an error, session replay tools help you step into a customer’s shoes to understand the exact shopper’s journey within the context of an error. 

Taking the time to see what actually happened can provide new insights into what triggered an individual error, especially when it may not be obvious at first. Adding contextual data, such as browser type, device, and operating system, helps to reproduce and fix issues. Once you’ve analyzed enough sessions, a more complete picture of user behavior patterns emerges, which you can use to identify potential pain points in the customer journey.

• Proactive Approach to Prioritize High-Impact Errors

As you identify all of your most common errors, you can take control of them by adopting a proactive approach that prioritizes addressing the worst ones first.

Contextualize the total impact of errors by looking at several factors: the total number of sessions that were impacted by each individual error, how many were lost due to it, and the annualized revenue loss it is creating. 

Focus resources on fixing high-priority issues first, such as checkout process errors, payment gateway failures, or any other issues that cause the greatest annualized revenue loss. As you analyze each error’s impact, it’s important to remember that the ones that occur most frequently aren’t always the ones that lead to the greatest amount of lost revenue or conversions. Regularly review your funnel and your list of errors to ensure your efforts prioritize the right issues. 

Noibu and BigCommerce: Joining forces to combat errors

To address these challenges, Noibu and BigCommerce have partnered to provide robust error detection solutions for ecommerce businesses using BigCommerce. This collaboration aims to ensure BigCommerce websites have smoother website performance and enhanced customer satisfaction.

The partnership introduces new customer functionality, featuring one-click integration that allows BigCommerce customers to easily connect their online stores with Noibu's error monitoring platform. This simplifies the setup process, saves time, and ensures that merchants can quickly start monitoring and resolving website issues. Noibu's solution automates the process of error detection, surfacing and prioritizing errors based on their revenue impact, and provides actionable insights directly to development teams for swift resolution.

Success stories: Error detection in action

Numerous ecommerce businesses have already benefited from the combined power of Noibu and BigCommerce. Here are two examples of advanced error detection in action:

King Arthur Baking Company

King Arthur Baking Company has been serving customers with high-quality baking products for over 200 years. As the company expanded its reach, it used ecommerce to better serve its growing customer base. Initially, it operated on a custom-built ecommerce platform, which provided a high degree of control and customization, but created challenges due to maintenance, scalability, and troubleshooting. 

It needed a more efficient and reliable solution, which led to its transition to BigCommerce. It now had a strong ecommerce platform as its foundation, but it ran into challenges that are typical of complex ecommerce environments: complex configurations, API extensions, browser updates, payment gateways, and third-party extensions.

Partnering with Noibu enabled it to improve its error detection and it is now able to quantify revenue and transaction losses caused by various bugs. The company resolved 48 third-party errors, eliminated API timeout issues, and fixed critical processing errors, recovering significant and enhancing the overall customer experience.

Store Supply Warehouse

Store Supply Warehouse, a leader in store fixtures and supplies, needed to streamline operations and improve the customer experience across its numerous brands. Managing 17 different ecommerce sites led to significant inefficiencies. With so many variations in the user experience, it faced difficulties in identifying and replicating customer-reported errors across various devices and browsers.

By migrating to BigCommerce and leveraging Noibu’s advanced error detection and resolution capabilities, Store Supply Warehouse transformed its ecommerce strategy, achieving seamless site management and exceptional customer satisfaction.

Using BigCommerce and Noibu enabled the company to shift from a reactive approach to resolving issues to a more efficient and proactive one, condensing their brands to five and using Noibu's advanced error monitoring, session replay, and reporting features to address issues before they impacted customers. This strategy dramatically reduced their time spent monitoring errors from up to ten hours per week to just two hours.

The final word

While errors are an inevitable part of ecommerce, they don't have to disrupt your business if you put the right systems in place. Proactive error detection and resolution are crucial to maintain customer trust, loyalty, and maximize revenue in the competitive ecommerce landscape.

By implementing comprehensive error detection strategies, businesses can improve customer satisfaction and retention, boost conversion rates and revenue, all while reducing operational costs associated with manual error detection and resolution.

As ecommerce continues to evolve, businesses that prioritize error detection and resolution will be better positioned to provide seamless shopping experiences and drive long-term growth. Remember, investing in error detection isn't just about fixing problems — it's about creating opportunities. Every error caught and fixed is a potential lost sale recovered or a customer relationship strengthened. When done right, it’s the most important ingredient of customer satisfaction they will never notice.

Read more about BigCommerce’s partnership with Noibu here.