Over the last few decades, the ecommerce landscape has transformed from its humble beginnings as running a simple online storefront for your retail business to something more akin to a precise science. 

With companies like Shopify reducing the barrier to entry to the industry with easy-to-use store builders and features that can get the average Joe up and running with a storefront in a day or two, the competition has never been fiercer. With it, the need to get it right has never been more important. 

Enter CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization, or the practice of increasing the percentage of completed sales on your ecommerce store relative to the number of users browsing and adding items to their virtual carts. 

When it comes to CRO, every decision you make regarding how your store runs and functions matters, which is why it’s so important to catch and fix bugs early–especially when most websites can be hiding thousands of bugs, a number so high that any single QA tester would never be able to find without the help of additional tools.

In this article, we’ll discuss using proactive visibility to improve the CRO of your ecommerce store. This includes learning how to detect bugs using specialized tools and prioritizing the issues that will give you the most bang for your buck to fix, so that you can learn how to better reduce cart abandonment and improve customer experience, ultimately leading to a better-performing website and more sales.  

The Problem with Ecommerce Development and CRO - The Inevitability of Bugs in Ecommerce

When developers build new features or change existing ones, updates usually undergo Quality Assurance (QA) testing. QA testers review the code and test the software to ensure that everything is working as expected before pushing the update to the “live” version of the software/website available to customers. 

While this kind of testing uncovers many of the major, glaring bugs in tools, it is still fallible, and important bugs can still sneak through. Additionally, once the updated code is pushed, new bugs can appear or be introduced due to issues outside the scope of QA testing or that involve other software tools that developers have no control over.

For example, with web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Edge releasing new versions every few weeks and Safari launching big updates a few times a year across desktop, mobile, and tablet editions, bugs or conflicts can pop up that no developer at your company or agency could have predicted but will now need to rush to fix. 

Ecommerce stores aren’t safe from their own trusted services and tools, either. Updates to the platforms your store is built on and other tools connected to it, such as search, marketing automation, social selling tools, and various smaller apps and add-ons, can release code whenever they want and automatically deploy it to your store. This could introduce strange behaviour to your site and its checkout experience that could cause issues down the line. 

Typically, a website can hide between 1000 and 3000 bugs, of which only a small number significantly impact functionality, performance, or look and feel. Even if a QA tester could find all of them, the real challenge is triaging and prioritizing the ones that are worth fixing.

For most ecommerce leaders, determining which bugs to fix is tied to lost revenue. Which bugs and performance issues will cost you the most if you don’t fix them, and which will make you the most money if you do?

The bottom line? No matter how good your developers and QA testers are, every website experiences revenue loss due to abandoned customer sessions. This is why it is so important to put in place tools that will proactively alert you to and provide visibility into how to address the issues driving those lost sessions.

The Cost of Not Proactively Detecting and Fixing Bugs

Proactive visibility or proactive monitoring is a way of continuously monitoring your systems to identify potential issues before they grow or become significant issues for your company. By giving your team a bird's-eye view of all the bugs affecting your website, big or small, you can better understand which issues affecting your site today will cause you to lose the most revenue this year.

Proactive monitoring can be lucrative in ecommerce bug management, while not implementing a bug tracking system can cost companies millions of dollars in revenue, depending on their size. 

First, you must consider the cost of lost sales due to CRO-related bugs that can be introduced or that your QA team may not have had visibility into. These issues can silently wreak havoc on certain store visitors, creating checkout issues and other unexpected behaviour that could affect how your potential customers navigate and use your website. 

Next comes all the time that your development team or ecommerce agency will need to spend to hunt down the source of any issues reported by your customers, reproduce them, do root cause analysis, and, finally, fix them. Finding a platform that can help with the reproduction and root cause analysis work saves an enormous amount of time, and that time can be spent on building new features or improving existing ones. 

Finally, it’s not just your development team that will need to waste time on bugs, but other team members as well: Your customer service team will have more tickets and emails to answer, and anyone who has an analytical role might need to put in extra effort to investigate if metrics like conversion rates are lower because of a marketing, product, or development-related issue. 

Benefits of Proactive Bug and Performance Monitoring

Instead of reactively fixing bugs when customers complain or conversion rates tank, proactive software bug management and reporting help prioritize bug fixes based on their potential to cause the most issues and/or cost the most money, rather than waiting for problems to arise and rushing to fix them. This ultimately leads to: 

• Better Resource Allocation: Seeing all the bugs on your site allows you to monitor and prioritize bugs by financial impact, ensuring that development efforts are focused on where they can generate the most return.

• Increased Revenue: Businesses can prevent revenue loss and improve conversion rates by identifying and resolving high-impact bugs.

• Enhanced User Experience: A smoother, bug-free shopping experience increases customer satisfaction and loyalty.

It’s all about using the right tools, teams, and automated solutions to detect all the problems–big or small–affecting your store, figure out which will cost you or make you the most money, and then act on them before they affect your store in any meaningful way. 

Prioritize bugs affecting the add-to-cart or checkout process (e.g., issues with CAPTCHAs, payment gateways, forms, etc.) as they are most important to your bottom line. Problems like the placement of pop-up windows or a customer service chatbot window covering a portion of a product image can likely wait. 

How to Improve CRO with Proactive Visibility and Agency Collaboration

We’ve discussed the effects of proactively monitoring your ecommerce store for bugs, but how exactly does someone go about discovering these issues in the first place? Here’s how collaborating with an ecommerce agency can improve CRO with proper bug management and planning.  

Ecommerce businesses can benefit significantly from partnering with agencies that understand the value of using a combination of bug-tracking tools and proactive visibility for bug management and CRO improvement. These agencies are equipped to handle the complexities of bug detection and resolution, ensuring that ecommerce platforms operate smoothly and efficiently, saving you time and money.

At Blue Badger, we sell packages to monitor, report on, and resolve your top 2 - 5 issues monthly and help turn your maintenance budget into an investment that returns positive cash flow.

A combination of bug-tracking software like our tool of choice, Noibu, and our skills at quantifying the financial impact of each issue helps us determine when and how a bug occurred and, more importantly, whether the cost of fixing it is worth it to our clients. Then, we can take this information and get to work building fixes around financial impact and customer satisfaction, so you see impactful results right away. 

Proper documentation is critical, so we love that Noibu integrates directly into Jira to create bug reports automatically. This prevents important details from slipping through the cracks, making it harder to replicate these bugs when it’s time to work on fixes. 

In addition, tasking an agency with the role of using a tool like Noibu ensures that a dedicated team is always available to regularly monitor it for new insights and quickly identify when new issues arise to properly prioritize and address them.

Conclusion

While a relatively niche subject, the value of proactive visibility on your ecommerce website’s issues cannot be understated when it comes to avoiding lost revenue from undetected bugs affecting your conversion rate. 

With the help of a tool that enables you to review, analyze, and prioritize the issues affecting your site the most and a skilled ecommerce agency to help you monitor and fix these problems, you can save millions of dollars in what would have been lost revenue and provide your customers with a better overall experience.

At Blue Badger, we can help you get started with a tool like Noibu and get to work analyzing your website, fixing your top CRO issues, and monitoring it for new problems so that you can take a proactive approach to bug prevention. Contact us today for a free assessment of your top CRO issues and advice on where to spend your CRO budget for the most impact.