Top 5 most common e-commerce conversion stoppers caught by Revend

Revend offers AI-assisted real-time monitoring that symptoms of declining conversion quickly. It automatically spots deviations in your online store's normal behaviour, and estimates how much revenue is potentially at risk. Revend is like a smoke detector telling you when something might be wrong (we detect the smoke). That makes you, the Revend user, the firefighter, who can use Revend's pointers to identify, confirm, and remedy the root cause of the issue before things get out of hand (you put out the fire). 

When we say that Revend caught the issues below, we mean that Revend caught the symptoms of these issues in real-time, and alerted the firefighters by telling them which funnel metrics were down (e.g. product views, add to carts, checkouts), when the drop started, and how much money was at stake.

Here are the five most common type of issues Revend uncovers:

1: Advertising issues

Reliable advertising performance is important to keep your e-commerce store healthy, drive traffic, and stay informed about the preferences of your audience. 

When issues affect advertising performance, they can spread out to impact your bottom line, your reputation, and employee morale. Since the ad stack is both diverse and complicated - consolidating content, tags, affiliates, inventory, mail, social media, to name a few - there are many moving parts, making it a considerable challenge to keep up with. 

By monitoring operational data in near real-time, Revend was able to uncover:

• Dead links in campaigns marked by a decline in product views.
• Underperforming ads marked by a decrease in conversion rates

Catching and fixing advertising issues early can help you make sure your advertising budget goes a long way. 

2: Tracking issues

We have an extensive article and a webinar recording dedicated to this topic. When there is a mismatch between the actual events and those that show up in your dashboards, you might be facing a tracking issue. Although this does present a direct revenue or business issue, it does risk misinforming your decisions going forward. For example, if you base the choice for an (expensive) ad a campaign on faulty information, you might be throwing money away without knowing it until much later. Another example is reporting. If you accidentally base your reports to the board or management on incomplete data, it might come back to haunt you later on. 

Since Revend spots the real values at the source, mismatches and javascript errors can be spotted and remedied quickly. In essence, whenever Revend notifications caused surprise or disbelief, further digging always uncovered hidden tracking issues that caused the existing dashboards to miss information that Revend was taking into account. 

3: Inventory issues

When supply chain issues hit, you want to be the first to know. Revend can support you by detecting the symptoms of inventory issues early on. 

By monitoring operational data in near real-time, Revend was able to uncover:

• Stock issues marked by an increase in cart abandonment rates and out of stock page increases
• Third party app outages (for example fulfilment and 3PL tools) marked by a sharp decrease in successful checkouts or failures to add items to carts

Regardless on the size of your operation, catching and fixing inventory issues early will save both your customers and your team a lot of potential frustration. 

4: Design issues

Imagine the following scenario: your web designer or agencies makes a number of great changes to the theme and design of your webshop, and a couple of hours later you receive a complaint about a customer not being able to check out because that button seems to have disappeared. You then realise that only 1 out of 13 customers actually takes the time to file a complaint, and rush to take the necessary steps to solve the issue, hoping to contain any further damage as quickly as possible. Although it is rare, such issues do occur, and can be spotted quickly with adequate operational monitoring. 
‍

By monitoring in near real-time, Revend was able to uncover:

• Design changes hiding buttons, marked by decreases in add to carts and checkouts
• Pop-ups blocking buttons to complete or initiate a purchase, marked by decreases in product clicks and add to carts

In a concrete recent example, Revend noticed both purchases and checkouts plummet fast, and as a result the user discovered that the copy of a button - critical to the checkout progression - had accidentally been changed during an update. Further crisis averted!

5: Infrastructure issues

For this type of issues a disclaimer is in order: there is a whole category of tools out there that specifically monitor all aspects of your infrastructure (for example hosting, uptime, etc.), and this is not the main monitoring focus of Revend. Revend captures the fallout of infrastructural failures, which can be an additional quantifying signal that helps to take action in a timely manner. To reuse the analogy from above: Revend is in these cases the smoke detector that goes off when the fire is started on the back-end instead of the front-end of your e-commerce store. 

By monitoring operational data in near real-time, Revend was able to uncover:

• malfunctioning caching plugins marked by a strong decline in add to carts
• (partial) database outages marked by a decline in add to carts and checkouts
• Payment gateway integration errors marked by a decrease checkouts and conversion rates

Depending on the size of your operation, catching and infrastructure inventory issues early can save you many hours in issue discovery costs. 

Closing thoughts

Whether you choose to work with Revend or apply another strategy, be sure to evaluate which of the issues above your business has faced in the past, and take the appropriate action based on the outcome of that exercise. We guarantee you that both your bottom line and your customers will thank you for it in time. If you are curious about what Revend can do to help you in this endeavour, you can learn more by browsing through other resources, or get started quickly here.