Eliminate eCommerce friction and website errors leading to lost revenue

17th September 2024
Online shopper unable to place order on mobile

Online shopper unable to place order on mobile

How to reveal and streamline the resolution of eCommerce errors

In today’s competitive eCommerce environment, customer experience is a key differentiator. Ensuring a smooth and efficient shopping journey is essential to prevent lost sales and maintain the trust your customers have in your brand.

Every eCommerce website faces Digital Customer Experience (DCX) friction and website errors — often hidden from your view. These are conversion-damaging issues that remain undetected by conventional monitoring and error logs. While you might be unaware of these obstacles, your customers are not, and their experience—and your revenue—can suffer as a result.

Friction examples include visible but “Unbuyable Products”, Product Logic Issues, Missing prices, images & sizes, Technical Errors, Checkout and add-to-bag errors plus Intermittent Slowdowns to name a few. These issues aren’t sitewide or consistent, making them difficult to identify, replicate and resolve. They may only affect certain products, categories, or customer journeys, complicating detection and replication. Additionally, addressing these critical issues often falls outside the remit of your tech teams and instead lies with business or product teams.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through a six-step, best practise approach to uncover and address critical DCX friction and website errors that lead to lost revenue. By focusing on these issues, you can enhance your customer experience, safeguard your brand, and ultimately boost your conversion rates.

Six steps to uncover and resolve critical eCommerce friction and errors

1. Simulate real customer behaviour 24/7
To uncover critical user friction accurately, you need to simulate real customer behaviour around the clock. Virtual Shoppers dynamically navigating through categories, products, product options and checkout processes, detect more issues, faster.

2. Measure with Real Browsers and genuine OS or Native Apps
To detect all potential errors, measure DCX using real browsers on actual operating systems. This approach reveals issues that emulated solutions might miss, such as device-specific rendering quirks, third-party interactions, or browser-specific bugs.

3. Gather and share critical DCX insights to unify teams
Unify your business and technical teams around a common point of truth, by sharing critical DCX insights. By highlighting customer-impacting friction through easily digestible data and dashboards, you can ensure that all relevant teams are aligned on resolving the most pressing issues.

4. Verify and prioritise errors by replaying customer journeys
Record and replay customer journeys to gain a deeper understanding of errors and their impact. This enables you to quickly verify the severity of issues and prioritise fixes that will have the greatest effect on improving customer experience and conversions.

5. Replicate errors with detailed steps and product data leading to the issue
Use video replays combined with dynamic data details and steps leading to an error to replicate it easily. This approach helps you pinpoint the underlying causes, speeding up resolution.

6. Swiftly resolve issues with easy access to granular data
Provide your tech team with the evidence needed to resolve errors swiftly. Enable drill down into granular component-level data to diagnose issues, understand root causes, and implement fixes as quickly as possible.

Infographic error resolution process

Streamlined error resolution process

Real-world DCX insights with “Digital Secret Shopper Technology”

To effectively uncover and eliminate DCX friction and website errors, it’s essential to interact with your site as real customers do—using real browsers and operating systems around the clock. thinkTRIBE’s DCX Intelligence Service utilises Digital Secret Shopper Technology to simulate user behaviour, gather critical data on customer experience, and report on issues 24/7.

Beyond simply identifying problems, thinkTRIBE helps you understand their impact through video replays of customer journeys, enabling easy verification and prioritization of errors. With access to detailed data, your tech team can swiftly diagnose and resolve issues, improving your overall customer experience and optimising Conversions.

Extend Your Team with Proactive Support

Managing DCX friction might seem overwhelming, but with the right tools and proactive support, you can be up and running with a solution like thinkTRIBE’s DCX Intelligence Service within just two weeks. This managed service helps you stay ahead of potential issues, ensuring your customers enjoy a seamless shopping experience every time.

For more detail on the Six Steps to reveal and resolve eCommerce friction and website errors download the complete guide here

ebook cover showing frustrated online shopper

author avatar
Louise Arnold