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. 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 #digitalexperience #DXfriction #DXmonitoring

Essential performance testing features to protect your brand Load testing is capable of delivering valuable data to inform your decisions and protect your customer experience when it matters most. But with the heightened complexity and sophistication of today’s websites, we look at why a traditional load testing approach is no longer up to the job. 1) It’s just too simple! You need real facts for even the most complex site When prioritising spend and making strategic decisions, you need to be in possession of the real facts. With most websites now incorporating complicated business logic, numerous third parties and complex features, load testing is much harder to get right. More traditional load testing approaches along with DIY testing and record and playback methods simply aren’t sophisticated enough to manage new technology resulting in oversimplified testing that masks genuine issues. To ensure your load testing results are rooted in realism you now need a dynamic approach that does exactly what your customers do, testing journeys across your site, making intelligent choices from page content, putting all complex functionality to the test and uncovering issues overlooked using other more simplistic techniques. 2) It’s not realistic enough Gain crucial insights based on real behaviour and realistic data to evaluate performance accurately Users don’t follow one idealised journey or add the same item to their basket time after time so why should your load testing? You need load test engineers to replicate a realistic traffic profile representative of genuine user behaviour you’d expect to see. This includes multi-step journeys, a realistic mix of customer journeys and drop-off ratios – all essential for accurate results. Traditional load testing methodologies rely on measuring simplified metrics. This kind of binary data can provide misleading results and mask important customer impacting issues. Realistic testing provides irrefutable evidence of the customer experience and creates a ‘single point of truth’ for prioritising software and hardware decisions, allocating budgets and more effectively managing third parties. This means you’ll see any and all issues and cover more of your site – including potential bottlenecks – and have the data you need to fix them. Calculating concurrent users is a case in point. It’s a metric often used to measure load but can throw out wildly inaccurate statistics as it doesn’t take into account what users are doing on your site. 3) It’s too time-consuming Take advantage of expert analysis and free up your team A third party that delivers data you can trust as part of a fully managed solution is a low-maintenance option for your tech team. We take clients’ analytics, define a realistic load test model, script journeys, schedule and monitor the testing. By outsourcing this specialist service to a trusted third party, you can gain unique insights into your website’s performance, while saving time, effort and in-house resources that can be more profitably deployed elsewhere. All this plus an external party can provide short lead times when you’re under pressure and greater testing capacity than available from your in-house team. The thinkTRIBE Approach Tribe’s fully managed load testing service  takes your analytics and creates the most realistic load test model and scripts journeys based on the real behaviour of visitors to your site – which means you’ll have speedy access to data you can trust. We script dynamic journeys that incorporate the realism needed to test the most complex of websites including multi-step journeys across a site looking into page content to make dynamic choices. If you’d like tangible, actionable performance testing data, whilst at the same freeing up internal resources contact us to find out more. Read more about our load testing service here or find out about managing a realistic load test programme in our eBook. #websiteperformancetesting #LoadTesting #traditionalloadtesting #performancetesting #webperformance

There comes a time in most websites’ lives, when the only option, in order to meet customer needs and technology demands, is to upgrade your website’s platform. Whether this be after upscaling within your current platform has reached its limit, or you’re wanting to achieve new goals not available on your existing platform, you need to make sure you’re fully prepared to have a seamless and as minimal damage migration as possible. Platform migration can create many opportunities for your business, but what are the risks? Downtime can be a serious problem – the longer your site is down, the longer you’re not making sales, the longer you give your customers to lose faith and search for their products elsewhere. If you don’t plan and carve out a sufficient amount of time to prepare, work on and test a site on a new platform, you are leaving yourself open to a number of glitches and bottlenecks, which you then won’t have time to rectify. This will lead to a poor customer experience when the site is live and could result in prolonged downtime. Loss of customers. This can be easily done when it can be so easily avoided. As discussed above downtime, glitches and bottlenecks can lead previously loyal customers to lose faith in a previously trusted site, or make new customers turn away instantly if achieving their goal takes too long, has too many hoops to jump through or they receive error messages at pivotal stages (such as payment). These issues can be overcome, and the risks to your business removed to achieve a smooth and positive platform migration – this is where thinkTRIBE’s FREE Ten Point Checklist will help: Audit your business processes – which parts of the old system need to be incorporated into the new one – how can processes be modified to make the most of the features of the new platform. Create goals – establish ways of measuring success or failure to better understand your ROI. Devise a timetable – ensure every department is aware of their involvement and goals for the migration and maintain regular meetings to ensure all are on track. Prioritise data and product migration – how will the new platform interface with your existing inventory. Sort out your SEO – ensure your optimisation is transferred appropriately and ensure enough time is allowed for this to be done properly. Allow time for training – Staff will need to get up to speed on the new platform, schedule this in at the beginning Test early and often – Assign a way of testing the new site before it is set live, when it goes live and then regularly to avoid glitches and bottlenecks. Keep your old site – run your old site in parallel until you’re 100% happy with your new site. Maintain customer communication – if any part of your customer service has changed, let them know. Monitor performance throughout – measure your KPIs on your old platform and then on your new, keep this maintained at regular intervals to ensure you can measure the impact of changes. For a more in depth step by step guide to maintain Customer Experience throughout your platform migration project download thinkTRIBE’s eBook!

It’s officially that time of year: the nights are long, and the weather is grim. Halloween might be behind us, the thrills and the scares put to the back of our minds as we move forward into the months of warm fires, hot chocolate, and mince pies. There is still one potential fright ahead of us, though. Before stockings get filled and carrots set out for reindeer, there is one significant date in the calendar, one no online retailer can afford to overlook. Black Friday. No longer confined to the megastores of modern America, the global retail holiday stands as one of the single most significant events in online shopping, and competition is fiercer than ever. Black Friday and the following Cyber Monday set the stage for your Christmas market, for New Year Sales and new launches in the spring. The 2021 market for Black Friday weekend sales is estimated at £4.8 billion. With global spending trends still impacted by the COVID-19 economy, it’s a revenue pie every company is eager to take a slice of. It’s probably a weekend your company has spent months preparing for. The campaigns are designed, your social channels are prepped, the warehouse is raring and ready to go. Your website probably looks excellent, carefully designed to entice loyal customers, and draw in new ones with amazing deals on your products. But what’s happening behind the scenes? It won’t matter how great your offers are if your website isn’t ready to handle the increase in traffic. One minor flaw in web performance risks a frustrated customer, and a frustrated customer might be tempted away by your competitors. If you’re not careful, your fabulous Friday festivities have the potential to become a Fright Fest. With thinkTRIBE’s help, you can put that fear to rest. Our fully managed Web Performance service creates user journeys that are Dynamic in their nature, so rather than following a fixed path they will move across your site exactly as a real customer would. And our Load Testing service creates a real world load model – exposing all bottlenecks and performance issues. thinkTRIBE, therefore, highlights any issues long before they impact your business – giving your teams visibility of your online web performance along with actionable/meaningful data to resolve performance issues. thinkTRIBE can help you manage your customer’s experience to better safeguard your brand values and optimise those Black Friday revenues. Take control of your website, take control of Black Friday, and start the winter ready for anything.

As retailers enter the peak weeks of the Golden Quarter, it’s fair to say that the stakes have never been higher. This year has forced a rapid change of pace for ecommerce operations. Brands with little or no online presence have had to quickly adopt one, while even practised players have redoubled their efforts to anticipate consumer buying patterns and match demand with supply. When it comes to online retail, it’s not just about getting the proposition right. The technological and logistical problems that have been the stumbling block for many – how to deliver a smooth user experience (UX), quickly converting eager browsers into confident buyers, and tying it into a suitably robust, back-end logistics function – are, of course, only exacerbated during peak buying times. Getting it wrong is expensive The basic ecommerce principle of giving customers what they want and ensuring they get it, on any given day of the year, sounds straightforward enough. In practice, it can be a tricky strategy to implement. Take a significant retail occasion – a new product launch or sales event like Black Friday, perhaps– throw a handful of supply issues and a few departmental mixed messages into the equation and you have the potential for significant reputational damage. There’s no shortage of examples demonstrating how even high-profile brands get on the wrong side of a PR spin. Just last month, Smyths Toys found the less-than-sweet spot between supply and demand when a lucrative promotional event turned sour after website glitches prevented customers from placing orders An increasingly competitive landscape Experts predict that this quarter will be a particularly competitive one, with retailers anxiously vying for a slice of a diminishing consumer pot. As Covid-19 takes its toll on the consumer purse, even usually bankable events like Black Friday will exert less overall pull : ecommerce consultancy Wunderman Thompson Commerce has estimated that Black Friday spending could shrink by 22 percent. The bright spark in an otherwise gloomy forecast for engaged ecommerce brands? That online spending is expected to take the lion’s share of business. WTC’s Welcome to the Mega Peak report (a survey of over 2,500 UK consumers) predicts that 67 percent of Black Friday shopping – a potential £3.7bn spend – will take place online. With shoppers harbouring concerns about the financial toll exerted by a toxic combination of the pandemic and January’s Brexit deadline, retailers will need to win every piece of business they can, while they can. Balancing functionality with a flawless UX We know that customers want a smooth browsing and buying experience. But we also know that they appreciate – and, in some cases, expect – the add-ons that enhance the journey. The automated personalisation features offered by our partner PureClarity , enables marketers to deliver precisely targeted campaigns that enrich the UX in a valuable win-win exercise. Delivering these twin ideals – an enriched and smooth customer journey – isn’t antithetical, even when considering performance around peak, so long as realistic testing protocols are factored in from the earliest stages. Simply put, any enhanced functionality – like PCP personalisation – will create an infinitely better UX and help drive conversions but should be used on tandem with a testing regime that ensures there are no obstacles to buying, regardless of traffic spikes. Peak has never been more critical Coming into this pivotal period, it’s essential to understand: The capacity of all digital channels to better analyse how many customers they can support and how many concurrent orders can be processed. How website changes may adversely affect the capacity or stability of the platform. What impact variations in traffic have on site performance and the UX. At what point the site will experience performance degradation and, ultimately, fall over. Test early and often At thinkTRIBE we recommend testing to expose any weaknesses, before making changes and then testing again to make sure your improvements are effective. If you repeat this testing loop, you’ll win more fans and convert more customers, while saving time, money and resources. It’s a strategy that could make all the difference in a pressured market. #peak #performance