How to make sure website errors don’t spoil your sales

Every year consumers spend more and more of their hard earned cash online and the holiday season is by far the biggest time of year for retailers. Between November and January can account as much as twenty to forty percent of a retailer’s annual sales. Deloitte’s Retail and Distribution practice expect total holiday sales to reach a record USD$1.04 to $1.05 trillion between November and January 2017, an 18 – 20% increase from 2016. (Source)

I would assume this is not a surprise to most people, but software developers and online store owners may be dreading the inevitable Christmas rush. The thing is, one mistake, an error with your checkout process or period of downtime for your website could cost you dearly.

Many developers believe they know what’s going on with their own software, but users are fickle these days. If they have a problem with your site, they have a vast array of alternatives to try rather than spend their time reporting errors they have experienced, and no matter how much development time is dedicated to testing, it’s a simple fact that software errors can occur in production environments that didn’t happen in any of your test environments.

Also, those errors are happening and you don’t have a clue. After all, how do you fix something you aren’t even aware of? If just 1% of your potential customers were abandoning their shopping carts due to an error they experienced, how much would that cost you? You simply can’t afford to hope for the best when it comes to online sales in the holiday season.

Perhaps you already measure how many people abandon your shopping cart process, but do you know why? Did they experience an error, or a slow AJAX request or horrific page load speed?

There is an answer to this problem. A dedicated error reporting service like Raygun can save your bacon and what’s more, you can try it for free. You can be confident your website is working correctly for users and sleep easy at night knowing that if problems arise, you’ll be alerted to them quickly.