How to rid your e-commerce platform of software errors before the holiday season starts

| 5 min. (915 words)

Software errors may be slashing your earnings from the holiday sales period by as much as 33%. If holiday sales account for 20 – 40% of your yearly revenue, that’s a lot of money left on the table due to preventable errors.

It can be easy to think that software errors don’t matter, but the reality is even minor usability errors can severely disrupt a customer’s journey causing cart abandonment and shattered brand credibility.

Even multi-million dollar retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and BestBuy, are guilty of allowing usability errors linger for months, which may seem okay at first, but with users becoming increasingly impatient and security averse, these minor faults are arguably as detrimental to your business as a major server outage.

The infographic below highlights a few stand-out statistics (article continues below).

Infographic

So, what’s going through your customer’s mind as they encounter errors on your e-commerce website?

The following statements are common thought processes where customers browse e-commerce websites and hit problems:

“This page may have been hacked – I don’t want to put my card details in!”

Lingering technical errors, layout bugs and 404’s can make shoppers think that your website has been hacked – in fact 99%, of people are concerned about security.

“How do I review my shopping cart before purchase? Did I select the correct size?”

Poor navigation confuses customers. Most customers are risk-averse, and if they can’t find their cart, where to pay or critical pages like your shipping details, they’ll bounce.

“This page must be broken. It’s not loading!”

Slow loading pages cause abandonment – after all a competitor is only a click away.

**E-commerce software errors present development teams with unique challenges – so what’s the solution?  **

The problem for development teams is that e-commerce sites are vast, with thousands of pages, interactive design elements and almost unlimited navigation paths for end users.

Minor layout bugs and JavaScript errors become impossible for developers to spot – buried under layers of site architecture. Despite these bugs having a significant effect on company’s sales, in every single audit, Baynard has conducted, they discover lingering errors and technical issues despite testing in up to date browsers.

“Nearly every single production site we’ve reviewed could benefit greatly from making (fixing bugs) a bigger priority.”

https://baymard.com/blog/bugs-and-user-experience

No-one introduces bugs on purpose. It stands to reason that most e-commerce companies are lacking something remarkably simple: visibility into problems affecting end users.

Raygun has designed our suite of products around this very problem, and we specialize in helping large retailers (like Nordstrom) get visibility into their problems so they can maximize sales during the busiest time of the year.

Here are a few common problems online retailers experience, and how Raygun’s Software Intelligence Platform can help

Crash Reporting for when you don’t know what you don’t know

Software errors happen as a natural part of your development process. Complex user navigations in a vast variety of environments cause problems you could never have tested for. Raygun alerts you to every error and presents the stack trace to your development team. Raygun compliments your current logging solution by aggregating errors into sophisticated groups and a single digest email so you won’t be flooded with error messages.

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When Luis Alonzo, a Software Architect for HealthCare.com integrated Raygun into their public website, they gained instant visibility into 2,000 errors occurring per hour. If you think this sounds like a lot of extra work in the busy lead up to the holidays, using Raygun’s smart email notification system, they were reduced errors to just 20 in two weeks and gained the benefits of a more user-friendly website. Read their story here.

Do you know exactly which pages are loading slowly, and why?

Slow loading pages are a large culprit of page abandonment, yet is usually among the easiest for your front-end developers to fix. Raygun Real User Monitoring will help you answer questions like:

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You can read how Chris Johnson, CEO of Hyperfish, uses Raygun to spot poor loading pages here.

Users don’t always report errors, so you don’t know what happened when

With Raygun you don’t always need to be reactive to support tickets, you can solve problems for your customers even if they don’t report them. With the User tracking feature, you can deliver highly tailored messages to users. Your customers will be surprised and delighted. Read how Senior Development Consultant Jon Crowell proactively solves errors for his users. (Link)

You aren’t sure if the latest deployment caused problems

As e-commerce sites grow, constant version releases are needed to ensure they are working smoothly for end users, whether that means migrating parts of your website or implementing new payment providers, the end users shouldn’t notice a thing.

Deployment tracking correlates version releases with error charts so you can spot problematic deployments including the commits that made them. Teams get peace of mind that each release is ready for the public.

Make finding and fixing your e-commerce software errors a priority this holiday season. Raygun doesn’t take long to implement and won’t disrupt your current workflow. Watch data flow through the dashboard almost immediately so you get instant visibility on errors and performance problems affecting pivotal pages on your e-commerce website.

And with no performance overhead, Raygun is “like having an extra staff member silently monitoring your application for problems.”

Want to get visibility into problems affecting end users?

Get in touch with our sales team to receive a find out how to