This is a guest post from Noibu.

A slew of problems can pop up when a buyer shops on your website. Maybe there’s a 404 error on the payment page, the address form malfunctions, or the shopper isn’t able to check out via Apple Pay due to a third-party error. The list goes on.

After working on enhancing the buyer’s journey and creating personalized marketing campaigns to boost conversions, such technical issues or hiccups in the customer journey can directly influence their shopping experience. More importantly, website errors can hurt your conversions and sales.

Proactively monitoring your site for any glitches or errors in the user experience can help you reduce their negative impact and prevent further damage.

Common mistakes on eCommerce sites that hinder conversions

Digital storefronts can encounter a variety of problems. We’ve broken down some of the most commonly occurring issues and explained how eCommerce monitoring can help you fix them to boost your site conversions.

1. Broken images

Images are one of the most influential decision-making factors for an online purchase. More than 90% of online shoppers consider product image quality to be extremely important when choosing whether or not to purchase.

Low resolution, broken images, and loading errors immediately diminish the user experience and may change the shopper’s mind about buying from you. While you want the photo to display in its best resolution to let the product shine, broken images fail to do so and negatively affect your conversions, as shoppers are unlikely to purchase products they can’t preview.

This is common for eCommerce websites that don’t use progressive JPGs on their product pages. Progressive JPGs are often 2%–10% percent smaller than traditional JPEGs and so load faster.

2. Slow-loading website

With 53% of online shoppers expecting eCommerce websites to load in three seconds or less, speed is thus crucial to any page aimed at conversion. If a page takes longer to load, the risk of bounce rate increases by 32%, and 47% of users will leave if it takes more than a couple of seconds. This means half of your site visitors will abandon your site if the load time is too long.

For eCommerce websites, fast page speed can be difficult to achieve due to large media files or server issues. So, it’s essential to monitor eCommerce page speed regularly and optimize the user experience.

Some of the ways to do so are compressing media files without lowering their quality, removing unnecessary plugins, minimizing Javascript and HTML files, and reducing redirects. Consider adopting performance audit tools like PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix that monitor page speed so you can take action early.

3. Too many plugins or integrations

While plugins and integrations are great for enhancing the functionality of your eCommerce store, running several of them can lower your site performance and lead to errors and glitches. In fact, 62% of all third-party integrations are likely to hurt your site performance.

Therefore, it’s advisable to have only plugins that you absolutely need and are compatible with your current tech stack. Keep a close eye on the rest and any issues they could be causing.

4. Broken links

Internal linking is an essential strategy because it helps crawlers understand your site structure and your shoppers quickly discover products they might need. Chances are, your eCommerce website is full of robust internal links. But these can break over time when you change a product URL or delete an item from your catalog.

If a user clicks on a broken link, it directs them to a “404 Not Found” error, which disrupts their shopping experience. As a result, shoppers become frustrated and abandon their carts.

5. Checkout page problems

Shopping cart abandonment is a long-standing challenge that eCommerce leaders face. Studies show the average cart abandonment rate for online retailers is 69.82%, which means that, for every 10 shoppers, only about three will complete the purchase.

The reasons for abandonment can include the checkout process being too complicated (e.g., having more than one page to check out on, no guest checkout option), too high of shipping costs, not enough payment options, slow speed on the checkout page, and more. Since the customer is very close to making a purchase at that point, these issues directly impact your top line.

6. HTTP and Javascript errors

Regardless of the quality of your codebase, errors are inevitable due to the complicated nature of eCommerce websites. These errors reduce your developers’ productivity, costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. In fact, developers spend on average 20% of their time debugging, rather than planning feature releases.

While it’s impossible to have a completely bug-free digital storefront, you can stay ahead of your website errors, resolve them efficiently, and reduce the negative impact they have on the shopper experience and your top line. That’s where eCommerce monitoring comes in.

What is eCommerce monitoring?

eCommerce monitoring is a proactive approach to uncovering and eliminating technical issues, bugs, and glitches that occur in online shopping websites. It helps brands address these problems that could be causing customer dissatisfaction, cart abandonment, and, most importantly, revenue loss.

For example, a malfunctioning “Pay Now” button on the checkout page could frustrate high-intent customers and cause them to drop off without completing their purchase. Left undetected, this could lead to hundreds or even thousands of customers abandoning their carts in a day. The annual revenue impact of this small error could be colossal for your business.

Having a dedicated error monitoring workflow in place would quickly notify eCommerce teams of this bug so they could resolve it before it causes major damage. By offering a comprehensive view of the errors occurring on the site, it helps eCommerce teams deliver flawless shopper experiences that modern consumers demand in today’s competitive online landscape.

How can eCommerce monitoring optimize your site for conversions?

Now, we’ll delve into how eCommerce monitoring helps optimize your site for conversions.

Streamline the user experience

A technical error like a malfunctioning button, broken image, or poorly loading website produces an unenjoyable experience and immediately dissuades shoppers from spending any more time on the site, let alone making a purchase. eCommerce monitoring assesses your buyer’s journey to check for specific barriers and shows you where you’re losing money to optimize your eCommerce funnel for conversions.

eCommerce monitoring platforms alert your product and development teams whenever a new error is detected on your site so you can address it before it seriously harms your CX.

Prevent revenue loss due to site errors

In eCommerce, even a trivial site error can result in the loss of thousands of dollars in revenue. This is no exaggeration by any means. Think about it, if a CTA like the “Buy Now,” “Add to Bag,” or “Pay Now” button malfunctions, you’re all but kicking out numerous customers whom you worked so hard to bring to your website in the first place.

Moreover, customers with negative experiences are less likely to return in the future. It damages your brand reputation and makes it challenging both to attract new buyers and retain existing ones. That lower customer lifetime value and conversion then impede your company’s long-term revenue goals. eCommerce monitoring helps recover lost revenue resulting from production-level bugs that impact user experience.

Identify the impact of third-party errors on site performance

Your eCommerce website may be using more third-party integrations than you realize. These plugins can conflict with each other, slow your website, or apply themes that are incompatible with your website. Such errors are outside your control, but you can watch out for them to mitigate the problems they cause.

With an eCommerce monitoring tool, you can monitor third-party bugs on your website and create an efficient resolution workflow so the relevant team can tackle them.

Optimize checkout flow

A seamless checkout process is a must for any eCommerce site, as it’s the last touch point before a shopper makes their purchase, so it should be flawless.

eCommerce monitoring tools can pinpoint any errors that disrupt the checkout stage, such as broken links, page-loading issues, or payment gateway failures. By staying on top of these issues, you can minimize your cart abandonment rate and maintain a smooth, secure, and reliable checkout process, which is fundamental in fostering customer loyalty and retention.

Wrapping up — Keep your website in top form with eCommerce monitoring

Ensuring your eCommerce website meets the expectations of today’s customers requires you to stay on top of your online experiences and your overall site health.

eCommerce monitoring platforms such as Noibu can help you gain a competitive advantage by eliminating revenue-impacting website errors that lead to customer frustration and cart abandonment. It detects problems in real-time and provides all the technical details developers need to resolve those issues without having to replicate them. What’s more, the platform ranks errors based on their revenue impact so you can prioritize the ones with the highest risk to your margins.

You can’t afford anything less than a stellar shopping experience for your consumers. With eCommerce monitoring, you enjoy a robust digital storefront without taking on the headache of site debugging.