4 Minute Read

Inside Smart Solutions' approach to catching issues before clients notice them

Every eCommerce agency faces the same painful cycle: a client calls about a broken checkout, your team scrambles to reproduce the issue, and hours later you're still piecing together what went wrong. We lived that reality until we changed our approach to monitoring.

At Smart Solutions, Webeyez has become central to how our development team delivers for clients. This isn't a feature overview - it's how we actually use the platform day-to-day to catch problems early, debug faster, and deliver more stable client sites. If you're evaluating monitoring tools or looking to get more value from Webeyez, here's what our developers have learned.

Performance Monitoring That Ties to Business Outcomes

Most monitoring tools tell you server response times. That's useful, but it doesn't tell you whether customers are actually completing purchases.

We use Webeyez's performance metrics to monitor what actually matters: order success rates, add-to-cart completion, and checkout flow health. When we see the order success rate drop from 95% to 85%, we know something broke - and we know it before anyone calls.

The bounce rate metric has been particularly valuable for identifying pages that cause users to leave. During a recent client redesign, we spotted a 15% bounce rate spike on a category page within hours of deployment. Session replay showed users hitting a JavaScript error that blocked product filtering - we fixed and deployed before the end of business.

The Metrics We Track Daily

  • Order success rate: Our primary indicator of checkout health. Anything below 90% triggers immediate investigation.
  • Add-to-cart average: Sudden drops often indicate product page issues or inventory sync problems.
  • Conversion rate trends: We look for patterns over time, not just point-in-time snapshots.
  • Bounce rate by page: Identifies specific pages causing user friction.

Failed Calls: Where Debugging Actually Starts

The Failed Calls view has changed how we approach troubleshooting. Instead of starting with vague user reports ("checkout isn't working"), we start with data: which endpoint failed, what error code, which devices are affected, and when it started.

Webeyez categorizes failures by HTTP status codes, timeouts, and data issues. This immediately tells us whether we're dealing with a server-side error (502s from the payment gateway), a client-side issue (400s from malformed requests), or an integration problem (timeouts on third-party APIs).

Our Debugging Workflow

  1. Filter by error frequency: High-volume failures get priority over edge cases.
  2. Check device distribution: Mobile-only failures often point to responsive design issues or touch event problems.
  3. Review the timeline: Did failures spike after a deployment? After a third-party update?
  4. Cross-reference with session replay: Watch what the user actually experienced.

This workflow consistently cuts our debugging time by 40-60%. We're no longer guessing at reproduction steps or asking clients to "try again and let us know what happens."

Alerts That Actually Help

Alert fatigue is real. Early on, we made the mistake of alerting on too many things, which meant we started ignoring alerts altogether. Now we focus alerts on what we call "revenue-critical paths": checkout, payment processing, and order confirmation.

Check out our guide on "Working With an eCommerce Agency: Everything You Need  to Know" >>

Our Alert Configuration Strategy

We configure alerts for specific URLs and endpoints where failures directly cost the client money. For each client, we set up monitoring on payment endpoints, shipping method selection, and the final order placement call. Thresholds are set based on historical data, not arbitrary numbers.

Example: For one client, we know their baseline checkout failure rate is about 3%. We alert when it exceeds 5% for 10 minutes. That's tight enough to catch real problems but loose enough to avoid false positives from normal variation.

The key insight: alerts should be entry points into debugging, not just notifications. Each alert links directly to the relevant dashboard and affected sessions, so we can start investigating immediately.

Heat Maps and Session Replay: Seeing What Users See

Heat maps give us the macro view - where users click, where they don't, and where they're rage-clicking in frustration. Session replay gives us the micro view - exactly what one user experienced leading up to a problem.

We use these tools together. Heat maps identify that something is wrong on a page (high rate of dead clicks on a non-functional element). Session replay shows us exactly what's happening (the element looks clickable but the click handler isn't attached).

Dead Clicks and Rage Clicks

These are underrated metrics. Dead clicks (clicks on non-interactive elements) reveal design problems - users expect something to be clickable that isn't. Rage clicks (rapid repeated clicks) reveal performance problems - the user clicked, nothing happened, so they clicked again and again.

In one recent case, heat map data showed rage clicks concentrated on the "Apply Coupon" button. Session replay revealed the issue: the button had a 3-second processing delay with no loading indicator. Users thought it wasn't working and clicked repeatedly. Simple fix, add a loading state, but we would never have found it without this data.

JavaScript Error Monitoring

Browser-side JavaScript errors are notoriously hard to track down. Users rarely report them accurately ("something broke"), and they often only affect specific browsers or devices.

Webeyez captures JS errors with full stack traces, affected URLs, browser/OS details, and the session context. When a new error type starts appearing, we can see exactly when it started (often correlating with a deployment), which pages it affects, and what users experienced.

We've caught several third-party script conflicts this way. A client's marketing team installs a new tracking pixel, and suddenly we see TypeError exceptions spiking on Safari. The Webeyez data gives us everything we need to diagnose and report the issue without hours of manual testing.

What Webeyez Doesn't Do

Transparency matters. Webeyez is excellent for frontend and API-level monitoring, but it has limitations our team has learned to work around.

  • Deep backend issues: Server-side problems that don't manifest as API failures still need traditional logging and APM tools.
  • Bot traffic analysis: Webeyez doesn't provide consolidated bot activity views. For attack detection, we use separate security monitoring.
  • Alert tuning: Out-of-the-box thresholds can generate noise. Plan to spend time configuring alerts for each client's specific patterns.

These aren't dealbreakers - they're scope boundaries. Webeyez does what it does well, and we use complementary tools for what it doesn't cover.

The Bottom Line

Webeyez has fundamentally changed how our development team operates. We've moved from reactive firefighting to proactive monitoring. Issues that used to take hours to diagnose now take minutes. Client escalations have dropped because we catch problems before users report them.

The real value isn't any single feature - it's how the features work together. Failed calls lead to session replays, which lead to heat maps, which lead to the fix. That connected workflow is what makes Webeyez worth the investment for any agency serious about client delivery quality.

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