Plan a Bug-Free Holiday Season for your E-commerce Website

For e-commerce websites, development teams have a lot of ground to cover. With thousands of pages, interactive design elements and almost unlimited navigation paths for end-users, minor layout bugs and JavaScript errors become impossible for developers to spot. Despite using up-to-date issue tracking tools and browsers, lingering errors and technical issues are inevitable, significantly impacting the company’s sales. No one wants bugs. What’s lacking is visibility into problems affecting the end-user.

Bugs are a natural part of the development process and a lot of them can go undetected when there are complex user navigations in a vast variety of environments. Issue tracking tools alert you to every error and keep track of them for your development team. Error logging becomes easier as these tools aggregate errors into sophisticated groups and a single digest email so you won’t be flooded with error messages. And if you’re too busy this holiday season, the email notification system can come in handy, alerting you instantly with important updates and helping you resolve issues as early as possible.

For starters, one thing users don’t like is slow load speed. And while pages tend to slow down in holiday seasons due to high traffic, you should ask yourself the following questions to figure out if other things are in order:

• At what point did the user encounter a slow loading page?
• What caused the problem to happen to this user?
• What path did they take before encountering the problem?
• Was it just a single pageview or the whole session was poor?
• What were the factors?

Customers often don’t report errors so you don’t always know what happened or when. Some issue tracking tools offer user tracking feature that helps deliver highly tailored messages to users. Involving customers in the issue tracking process can not only make the process itself easier but also affect user satisfaction levels.

Constantly updating the website with new version releases becomes important as e-commerce sites grow. It ensures smooth working for end-users, whether that means migrating parts of your website or implementing new payment providers, the end-users shouldn’t notice a thing. The deployment tracking feature is integrated into most of the issue tracking tools today that correlate version releases with error charts so you can spot problematic deployments including the commits that made them.

Conclusion

This holiday season, make finding and fixing your e-commerce software errors a priority. Issue tracking tools don’t take long to implement and neither do they disrupt your current workflow. Robust dashboards provide instant visibility on errors and performance problems affecting critical revenue-earning pages on your e-commerce website.