How Noibu saved over $1.2 billion in revenue for e-commerce companies

Today on Minimum Viable, Terry and Will are joined by their first host, Kailin Noivo, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Noibu. They dive into the origins of Noibu, its unique positioning in the e-commerce market, and the potential for Noibu’s future growth.

When browsing e-commerce websites, consumers often encounter errors that prevent them from checking out, applying a discount code, or adding an item to a cart. These errors both cause a loss in revenue for the company and negatively impact the customer experience. When added up across all customers, this can lead to hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of lost revenue for a company in a single year.

The challenge for e-commerce sites in fixing these errors is that they often go unreported and can be extremely hard to find on their own. Often, companies only hear of errors in the checkout experience through customer reviews or calls to the support line.

Noibu has found that over 90% of website errors are never reported by customers

Noibu provides a software solution dedicated to solving this issue. Their core product offering is an eCommerce error monitoring platform that monitors your eCommerce site and flags and prioritizes errors that prevent customers from checking out while collecting all the information required to quickly resolve them.

During the episode, you’ll learn about how Noibu started as a manually operated product to test product-market fit and how it eventually grew into a fully automated platform. This year, Noibu looked back at its customer data and found that it had saved over $1.2 billion in revenue for its customers by discovering and notifying them of their website errors.

Here are some resources you may find interesting to learn more about today’s topic

• Noibu
• Champion’s Product Team Moved From User-Generated Error Reports to an Automated Solution
• 94% of European checkouts have multiple errors

Episode transcript

type: "transcript"

[00:00:06 ] Terry Wang: Welcome to Minimum Viable, the podcast where we discuss product ideas and design elements that work, that don't work, and those you may not even notice. Today we're talking to Kailin Noivo, CRO and co-founder of Noibu, one of the fastest growing e-commerce startups in Canada. As always, my name is Terry and with me is Will. Kailin, how are you doing today?

[00:00:27 ] Kailin Noivo: Yeah, I'm doing great. Uh, thanks for having me Will and Terry, appreciate it.

[00:00:32 ] Terry Wang: Awesome.

[00:00:33 ] Will Green: To start off, like uh, can you just tell us a little bit about what Noibu is as a company and the kind of area that you work in?

[00:00:39 ] Kailin Noivo: Yeah. So Noibu's an e-commerce error detection platform, that helps mid-market and enterprise retailers recover loss revenue, um, that are occurring through technical bugs. Um, I really work primarily on the acquisition side. Um, so I worked to help acquire new customers, uh, make sure that we're acquiring the right customers and, uh, kind of grow marketing partnerships and outbound revenue.

[00:01:07 ] Will Green: So just kind of like a first quick question is obviously you're kind of working in an area that's less visible to consumers like us, but is this something that enterprise businesses and e-commerce sites are thinking about or is it kind of a new introduction to, uh, this type of a service when you're looking at a leads and talking to new customers?

[00:01:28 ] Kailin Noivo: Yeah. So we're actually building a new category. Uh, so typically what's happened before. Is you either have a, an application monitoring tool, something that's very dev focused, um, or you have something that's very marketing focused, like a session recording tool that focuses on heat maps or UI UX. But the phenomenon that we're seeing is really a by-product of two things.

Number one is if you look 10, 15 years ago, the sheer amount of different browsers and devices and different payment options were much less than they are now. So before you'd have your credit card gateway and you'd either be on a, uh, Dell, kind of internet Explorer scenario, or you'd be on a Mac, right? So there's really two options, internet Explorer, or safari.

And now we're seeing all these different types of browsers, mobile shopping, tablet shopping. Um, so that has just created way more different, uh, way more use cases. And it's just completely different. So you can't manually QA this. It's way too complicated. So back in the day used to be able to just launch a feature.

Go on, you'd have one Mac, one PC, you'd go, you test it out. It worked it worked. Now you can shop from an X-Box all these different browsers, consistent software updates. It just creates way more complexity. So that's the first phenomenon.

The second phenomenon is more built around outsourcing your technology. So, before e-commerce companies would have a lot of people in house. Now, what we're seeing is they're using a lot of development agencies and partners to do the work.

So what that means is you end up in a scenario where the retailer thinks that the agency's looking for bugs, but the agency has 10, 15, 20 other customers and they think that it falls onto the retailer's plate. So really what's happening at the end of the day is that there's technical bugs that are live on the website that are not caught by QA, that are hurting revenue. And ultimately the retailer is feeling and suffering the burden of, uh, of those losses

[00:03:34 ] Will Green: Yeah. I mean, it was like, when you talk about an e-commerce bug, like, uh, from a consumer sense, like what does that actually mean for the user experience and what is an example of a bug that would stop a revenue on a site or stop a purchase from going through?

[00:03:48 ] Kailin Noivo: Yeah. So there's a, there's kind of like an active bug that's in the ecosystem right now. Um, that we're well aware of. Um, so on a certain platform and I won't name the platform. If you try to check out right now, um, with a credit card and it gets declined. And then right after that, you try and check out with apple pay and the same session, there's a software bug that won't allow you to use apple pay because it thinks there's already an active payment session that's coming through the actual other gateway. So it will block you from using apple pay. So let's say you're on your, um, So you're on your mobile device and the credit card functions is not working, which is super common.

Like everyone has different billing devices, you move, you forget what it is. Um, and then at that point you try and use apple pay. You just can't do it. Um, and we've observed this across a bunch of our customers and now they fix it because it's within their range, fix it, but it's actually a platform gap from one of the major platforms.

Um, so that would be a great example. Um, another great example that comes to mind is, um, How many people do you think are using Firefox on an iPhone? Right? Probably not that many, but enough where you're probably losing two, 300 grand a year in sales, because for whatever reason, in some cases, the checkout just might not. Because no one tests that like, no, one's going to QA and test that. So the customers find the gap and then that's where they go to social media to complain and talk about, oh, I couldn't use your website or they just simply go to a competitor.

[00:05:25 ] Terry Wang: For sure, for sure. And I, it seems like such a specific issue. You guys have obviously found the unit economics of it and made it work. And it clearly does work just with the Firefox example. I think that really shows it. Was this always the idea behind Noibu, or was this something that you gradually found?

[00:05:45 ] Kailin Noivo: Yeah. So Noibu actually just turned five years old, uh, on Monday this week. And, we originally started off as a VR shopping platform, uh, which is completely different, um, where essentially users would put VR goggles and be able to shop storefronts from all across the world.

Um, and really, we ran with that for about two years and it got very little traction, like probably less than 50,000 in sales. And then at one point, um, we kind of knew something was up, um, that the product wasn't getting product market fit, we had about 10 customers. Uh, so really, uh, one of our customers was having issues with their checkout and kind of at the same time, we're looking for some ideas to work on because we knew we wanted to pivot out of what we're doing.

And, uh, we basically ran a survey, um, to understand what some of the most common pains were. And, uh, two of those retailers put up their hands and said, Hey look like we're having some conversion issues. And we think it's due to a release we just did. And we think we're having checkout bugs and we actually manually went and found the bugs ourselves.

And that kind of was the proof of concept at the beginning. And that was about, uh, three years ago. It'll be three years ago that that pivot took place at the end of this month. And, um, yeah, it's been, it's been pretty crazy ever since.

[00:07:05 ] Terry Wang: So that's really interesting that you guys, you guys completely pivoted like this current super successful iteration of Noibu has almost nothing to do with that first version, outside o