Claus Lauter [00:00:00]:
Welcome to episode 303 of the ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we talk about what you should know about website arrows and how they are impacting your business. Joining me on the show is Kailin Noivo. He is the co founder of noibu.com. So let's dive right into it.
Voice over [00:00:18]:
This is the e commerce Coffee Break, a top rated Shopify growth podcast dedicated to shopify merchants and business owners looking to grow their online stores. Learn how to survive in the fast changing e commerce world with your host, Claus Lauter, and get marketing advice you can't find on Google. Welcome.
Claus Lauter [00:00:43]:
Welcome to the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of the ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we want to find out about website errors, how it impacts your business, and what you can do to prevent any kind of errors on your website. Joining me on the show Today is Kailin Noivo. He's the co founder of noibu.com, a leading error monitoring platform for surfacing, prioritizing and solving website. So let's dive right into it, and let's welcome Kailin to the show. Hi, how are you today?
Kailin Noivo [00:01:09]:
Great. Thanks so much for having me on. Really appreciate it.
Claus Lauter [00:01:11]:
Yeah, great to have you here. I think we have never spoken about the possibilities of having a website that does not perform 100% where errors are coming up. And I have heard something that about 90% of website errors are never reported by customers by website visitors. Is that true? What's your experience with that?
Kailin Noivo [00:01:29]:
Obviously it depends on the type of product that you sell. But often the more accessible the product is online, the less likely someone is to report an issue. Issues could be things as small as images not loading. That causes someone to bounce to one of the payment gateways just not working. Candidly, it's something that typically will cost you three to 5% of your annual GMV in terms of broken links, images not loading, and some of the gateway issues that I had mentioned before, I.
Claus Lauter [00:01:57]:
Think everyone comes to a website basically daily where something is not working. Now with ecommerce, that's a crucial thing. If something is not working, the trust factor just vanishes. You will not buy from a website that is broken and trust them with your credit card. Now, a lot of businesses out there, they are more reactive than proactive when it comes to fixing errors. Panic comes up and I've spoken to many, many ecommerce entrepreneurs and everyone has a story to share when something broke and what kind of impact that you had that has a relatively high impact on your revenue. Now let's dive into what actually is the worst case scenario, how can I deal with that?
Kailin Noivo [00:02:39]:
Yeah, I think the most common story for most e commerce businesses is they don't hear about errors every single day in most cases. But when they do, it's often a customer that will say, oh, I had struggle checking out, or an executive that actually finds an issue and then everyone scrambles to try and reproduce the issue and then it's all, it works on my computer, how come it doesn't work on yours? And it's really kind of really challenging to coordinate what the actual issue is and understand the impact. So often what will happen is there's these like micro, what I like to call micro downages. And what I mean by that is, oh, this region of the US on Firefox iPhone. These seven products don't work when you try and add them to cartoons. PayPal doesn't work in another region when your Internet speed is less than, I don't know, a certain threshold. So it's all these like edge case impacts that when you aggregate them up, like I'd mentioned, can cost you up to three to 5% of your total gmv, which is often pretty significant for brands.
Claus Lauter [00:03:44]:
Now, if you're a bigger brand, you probably maintain your own platform. You have headless commerce, you have a team, a development team, and they obviously should be focused on developing your website, not focusing on finding bugs in your system. I understand you have a lot of experience with that. What's your approach to help them?
Kailin Noivo [00:04:02]:
When we look at bugs, I've never met a software engineer or a manager or product manager that wants to allocate 30% to 50% of their bandwidth to bugs and stability, right? They want to build features, they want to drive KPI's. But often it's a necessary evil to really stabilize the website. What we've realized is through this journey of almost the last decade, is a lot of that maintenance was actually being scoped manually. So a good example is you have a QA that will qa the website. They'll find 15 different defects. Then someone will manually try and scope a business case, try to estimate based on the traffic percentage of the browser device. Combination with the ROI of solving this bug is, and then stack rank that against building a new feature. So it's always trying to balance like speed and agility of shipping to quality.
Kailin Noivo [00:04:55]:
And really what we're on a mission to do is automate quality. And what I mean by that is it's how do we build a system that will take you from 35% of your engineering hours spent on dev work to under 5%. I think a really famous case that we worked with it is carpet four, which is one of the top ten retailers in the world based on revenue. When we started working with them back in 2020, a lot of their time was going on stability. And what I mean by automating stability is starting off with ensuring that there's no false positive Jira tickets that are being opened up from customer service. So how does customer service investigate complaints? Okay, cool. Eight out of ten are false positives, and then the other two are actually the same issue. So you don't have to open up multiple different tickets.
Kailin Noivo [00:05:45]:
You open up one ticket and making sure that less tickets get open. But then when the tickets do get open, how do we ensure that the quality of the ticket is as high as possible so that the business slash support team is speaking the same language as the technical team. And no one has ever built a product that has enabled business product slash customer service to interact with technical people in a language that makes sense to both, that's centered around the KPI's for the business. So as you start implementing these systems, you see less tickets get open, they get solved quicker, and there's a lot more automation around your releases and things like that. So all in all, your time spent on bugs will actually dramatically decrease and the quality of your website will also increase, which is going to drive revenue for the business, which means everybody's happy. Engineering, spending less time on bugs. But also the business and growth team are ensuring that bugs aren't slowing down the return on ads or they're just general sales.
Claus Lauter [00:06:48]:
A very important thing that you mentioned there, and I had this in the past, is there's just different languages involved. A developer speaks and understands a different language than, as I said, somebody who's in marketing, and sometimes they just cannot communicate with each other. It just doesn't work. So you need some middlemen or a system in the middle that helps with that. Now, bigger systems obviously said there's a lot of APIs in there, there's payment gateways there, there's email gateways there, and so on, so forth. How is it possible? Or what's the best perfect way to monitor all of these different systems to really find where the bug is?
Kailin Noivo [00:07:23]:
In the absence of an automated system, often the engineering teams are a bit siloed out of the business, unless you work for like an Amazon or a Walmart. Most people use systems integrators, like, I think like 70 75% of our base interacts with the systems integrator because ultimately they build clothing, they build retail items, they don't consider themselves a technology business. And being able to actually understand the root cause is really important. So a great example is Apple Pay doesn't work, right? Okay, cool. Is it a native Apple issue? Is it a server issue? Is it a JavaScript issue that is blocking you because of the browser device combination that you're using? Right. Is it a. Oh, your shipping options aren't properly loading into like what is the actual root cause so that you can triangulate who you need to open up the ticket with? Is it an internal issue? Is it an SI, is it a third party issue in which you need to communicate directly with the third party? So being able to instrument the root cause in once again, a way that is understandable for both technical and non technical people, is often one of the biggest gaps that we fill. Even if someone is using an error monitoring, a traditional error monitoring system that's built for highly technical people to triage through hundreds of different error codes, being able to actually enable both teams to collaborate on the same platform is where we found that we're driving a ton of value because it's often product and business folks that own bug creation at large retailers because they're interacting often with the systems integrator or a remove team.
Claus Lauter [00:09:00]:
Very interesting. So noibu, obviously you monitor ecommerce sites and you flag arrows in real time. How does that work? Give me a bit of an idea. Is there AI involved? How do we process all the data that is coming in?
Kailin Noivo [00:09:12]:
The way that our strategy is looking at this is if we can get percentage of engineering time spent on bugs to zero while the quality of the website is at the highest point it's ever been. That's the ultimate goal. So through that you need to streamline and drive automation. No one's going to invest in a tool that's going to make their engineering team spend more time on bugs. It's the opposite. You want to get more done with way less time. So to answer your question, how it works is we aggregate all the different issues, and because we're vertically integrated, we have access to data that's not publicly available through the platforms that we work with and some of the third parties. And we really try and capture 100% of the issues on your website.
Kailin Noivo [00:09:56]:
And then we basically look at that and we say, hey, when these, out of the 20,000 issues that we caught, when these twelve issues occur, conversion drops by 2030, 40% to that cohort of users. So we really streamline the prioritization and then from that point, we provide a richness of information that's not only understandable to the business person, but more impactful. Helps the technical person solve the bug much quicker. So we show them exactly where the issue is, where the codes breaking, explain to them how to fix it. And we even have recommended coding solutions for the engineering team to actually leverage to fix the bugs.
Claus Lauter [00:10:35]:
Hey Claus, here, just a quick one. If you like the content of this episode, subscribe to the weekly newsletter at newsletter Dot e commercecoffeebreak.com I score and create 50 news sources so you don't have to saving your hours of research. Grow your revenue with ecommerce news, marketing strategies, tools, podcast, interviews and more, all in a quick three minute read. So head over to newsletter Dot ecommerce coffeebreak.com to subscribe as said, 100% free. Also, you will find the link in the show notes. And now back to the show. Now, the first point of contact for reporting a bug might not necessarily be the developer or the engineering team. That might be customer support.
Claus Lauter [00:11:10]:
That might be marketing anyone else in the organization. What's your recommendation to deal with this kind of reporting structure?
Kailin Noivo [00:11:19]:
To your point, often it's not going to get opened up directly with engineering. So it actually usually goes through two to three sets of hands. So it goes from the customer to the customer support agent. The customer support agent will try and help them debug at that stage to avoid opening up a ticket. That's the first place where we drive value. We empower through our system the ability for the customer to support agent to understand what's happening to the customer so that they can actually help the customer complete the transaction without opening up a ticket. That's the first place. The second place is that often gets sent to a business analyst or a product manager or somebody who's like a middleman, middle woman on the business side.
Kailin Noivo [00:11:58]:
They try and replicate what the customer saw and scope the size and scale of the bug so that they can coordinate with the engineering team. We automate that as well. We have the exact line of code that's broken. We show you exactly where the error is. We quantify the error automatically in terms of a gmv impact, and we then enable you to sync that issue directly with Jira so that when the engineering team gets that ticket, it's in a way that is understandable to them, that they can then move and fix it as quickly as possible. And then I mentioned the last part, which is a third stakeholder is the engineering people. They don't want a ticket that sounds like, oh, Sally couldn't check out last Thursday on iPhone. Like that doesn't help them.
Kailin Noivo [00:12:45]:
And that's most of the tickets that will come in or someone will try and replicate it and it's just, it's very low fidelity info. So once that ticket gets to them, we want them to be able to solve it. Now that's the workflow that we call the reactive workflow that we really help enable and make way more efficient. What we want to get the to is a place where they've been proactive, meaning the engineering team is collaborating with the product team to pro do one to two cycles of tech debt so that they actually solve all the outstanding issues. And then from that point on, as they do releases our systems, notifying them of new impactful issues that are coming up so that it never gets to the point where it gets to customer service. So customer service will get less calls and less things will be actually passed down the line. That's how we will eventually get you to under 5% investment of your time towards support and maintenance.
Claus Lauter [00:13:44]:
No, makes perfect sense. Tell me a little bit about the implementation. It sounds very complicated because there's so many moving parts in there. What are the process steps to get up and running?
Kailin Noivo [00:13:53]:
Yeah, so what we like to do with everyone who's interested is we like to run a complimentary trial audit. So the initial deployment is quite easy. It's just through Google Tag manager, so it takes less than five minutes to deploy. It's an asynchronous script. We don't collect or store any private data. We're fully GDPR compliant for the european users. So that's the initial deployment. And then often when people sign on, there's maybe a one to two hour commit on both sides to set up our SDK, the backend integrations and all the other stuff.
Kailin Noivo [00:14:24]:
But its all pretty seamless to be honest. Its just quick integrations.
Claus Lauter [00:14:29]:
Whos your perfect customer? Are there specific industries or nukes or verticals that you work more with than others?
Kailin Noivo [00:14:35]:
Yeah. So were platform and vertical agnostic. What we really like to do and were a big sweet spot for us is anybody who likes to treat their website like a product and actually iterate and add features and they see it as a competitive advantage that is a perfect fit for us. And then typically higher margin, higher AOV customers also are important to us because the cost of a transaction is pretty high. Like if you're selling a Cartier bracelet, right? Losing one transaction is way more impactful than if you're selling socks online, right. No disrespect to socks, but like, you lose one or two transactions, not the end of the world, you're more of a volume play. But once again, we serve both verticals. But typically, the higher the AOV, the higher the traffic, the higher the complexity.
Kailin Noivo [00:15:27]:
That's typically where we drive the most value.
Claus Lauter [00:15:30]:
Can you share a success story of one or case study of one of your customers? From implementing to going live, what kind of results did they see?
Kailin Noivo [00:15:40]:
So one is car four, which I mentioned, which we have a case study with on our website. Not only were we able to drive conversion, but we're able to drive a ton of internal efficiency where they've actually streamlined the way that they intake customer errors. They've gotten to a state where they're proactive with the release monitoring and they're ensuring that they're always staying ahead on quality so that they can spend more time on features. On the pure GMV and sales side, when guests moved over to a new platform during COVID and 19 guest has been a customer for multiple years, they effectively deploy. They were having a lot of stability issues in terms of just like there was bugs, because as you launch a new website or you go headless, you replatform, there's going to always be issues. We're able to work with them to actually not only clean up the backlog, but also get ahead on tech debt. And they saw a 15% increase in their checkout conversion. And one of the main reasons for that was just they made it seamless.
Kailin Noivo [00:16:39]:
They had a lot like any other retailer, by the way, an old version of Safari on this iPhone, this iPad, doesn't work 100% of the time. Like there's all these micro outages that no one ever thinks about. Even if you have QA, it's going to get occasionally reported. And then what will happen is someone will replicate it on their device. And unless it just so happens they have the same combination of product, device timing, all of that, which is almost never the case, it's going to work for them in which they're then just going to say, oh, it must have been an intermittent issue and they're going to just write it off as a user issue or an intermittent issue, when in reality there's actually a micro downage, especially if you're multi currency, all these things really start to come into play.
Claus Lauter [00:17:24]:
I think very important that you mentioned there. You should focus or prioritize the ones, the bugs that basically have the biggest impact on your business and then work from there and then the one that really occasionally comes up or on a very old device, you need to decide if you want to invest the work in solving it or just moving to more important things. Now you have your finger on the parts of e commerce. What kind of emerging trends do you see right now in the online retail landscape?
Kailin Noivo [00:17:52]:
A trend that ive been seeing is, as COVID started to happen, brands that didnt really care that much about EcOM. Candidly, I was selling into EcoM before COVID and it was often not the biggest, most funded department there was running jokes. Its the smallest store from a percentage of sales, but they have the largest budget and I think the narrative is largely flipped where its now the largest store with the largest budget for most brands. And I think what I saw was a big rush towards getting websites stood up as quickly as possible or modernized as quickly as possible. So a lot of templates were being used and a lot of common frameworks were being used to launch websites. And now that overall the macro softened a little bit, people are investing more into customization, more into headless, more into composable so that they can differentiate their online assets. When you take a look at it, you go into a, I mentioned Cartier, whos a Noibu customer, or Mont Blanc or Chloe. And these high end brands, you go into their store and it does not look the same as someone who just launched SMB boutique in a strip mall.
Kailin Noivo [00:19:03]:
Right? Like it doesn't look the same. So having your online properties virtually look the same and being built from the same templates is often, I think, something that people are now rethinking of. So I'm seeing a trend where things are moving more towards composable, towards headless, towards heavy customization as people are looking to now increase their conversion rate as the big flush to e.com. I don't think it mattered when everyone was forced to buy online, but now that there's more competition and they're not forced to buy online, I'm seeing differentiation through experience, through customization being really, really, really important to a lot of key brands.
Claus Lauter [00:19:44]:
That's an interesting thing that you mentioned there. I think it also has a lot to do with branding, especially the top level brands want to basically separate themselves from a theme, from a template that you just can buy for $400 somewhere. So that makes perfect sense. I want to touch quickly on the AI perspective on what's happening right now. What's your take on what's happening in ecommerce and AI?
Kailin Noivo [00:20:06]:
Yeah, I had a post on this the other day and by no means am I an AI expert, but I do think that what AI has really done in the last year, two things, a, it's empowered smaller brands to actually embrace it. I think I AI is something that Walmart, Amazon, all those different brands were using in the past. And I think the more mid market junior enterprise, small enterprise teams with smaller budgets can actually leverage it. I think one of the trends I've seen is really how do I compile historical data to forecast demand, for example, how do I use it to augment my customer service experience? I think theres a lot of tactical use cases that were seeing versus the last trend which was web three and crypto and all that stuff where I think the applications a bit more nebulous. I think the application is pretty straightforward. You could either increase sales by further optimization, you could decrease costs by reducing support hours and things like that. I think you can start to automate a lot of tedious tasks, like maybe if you have multi store you need to translate, you can get a really good baseline through that. So those are some of the tactical things that I see being brought through with AI and I think it's going to be important part of the strategy.
Kailin Noivo [00:21:24]:
I think it is a platform shift kind of similar to mobile.
Claus Lauter [00:21:27]:
Yeah, 100% agree. I think you can't do with AI and if you just try to not put it into your business, then you will lose out very, very quickly. Before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there anything that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet?
Kailin Noivo [00:21:42]:
I think one thing that we know to be true in commerce since the beginning of commerce, whether it's offline or online, is expectations increase over time. And one of my earliest mentors once told me, and this is more applicable to the higher end non commodity purchases. Like if you're not buying toilet paper, if you're buying t shirts or shoes or something that's personal is the purchase is an exchange of emotion. And there's a lot of verbal and visual cues that go into purchases. And I think brands will need to heavily differentiate on their entire journeys. And that's why I think having a seamless, fast, customized experience is something that's just never going to go out of style for people that are effectively selling non commodity goods. If you're selling commodity goods, it's speed and cost and efficiency. I think if you are looking to actually protect your margins and have a higher margin business, you need to invest in brand and you need to invest in experience because that's what's going to justify like people go to Tiffany's to buy an engagement ring, not because they can't get the same sized ring with the same clarity at Costco for 50% of the price.
Kailin Noivo [00:23:06]:
They do it for the brand, they do it for the experience, they do it for the trust. And I think if both of those websites had the same website, then the good becomes worth the same. And I think both of those businesses are amazing. But that would be my thoughts.
Claus Lauter [00:23:21]:
Yeah, I think the key word there is trust. And when it comes to trust, as I said in the beginning, is like you want to have a seamless experience, as you mentioned, and you want to have a website that performs and that builds up this trust and doesn't have any kind of hiccups that might question you if you really want to spend your money there. And then again, it has to do a lot with branding. Where can people find out more about you guys?
Kailin Noivo [00:23:46]:
Yeah, I mean, they can reach out to me directly on LinkedIn, just Kaylin Noivo or go check out Noibu or go to our website, noibu.com dot. Those are probably some of the best places I would look.
Claus Lauter [00:23:56]:
I will put the links in the show notes, then you just want to click away. Kelly, thanks so much for your time today. I think it was a very good insight of what you can do to make your website waterproof and bulletproof and just perform and what kind of tools and services you offer to make that work. Thanks so much for your time today.
Kailin Noivo [00:24:14]:
Thank you for yours.
Claus Lauter [00:24:16]:
Hey Claus here. Thanks for joining me on another episode of the ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will make it also easier for others to discover the podcast simply like comment and subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast and even better if you could leave a rating. Thanks again and I catch you in the next episode. Have a good one.