My Agency Handles Our Site. Do We Still Need a Tool That Finds Issues?
Plenty of online stores hand their site to an agency and assume that covers it. A version of this objection comes up on sales calls: one prospect described its outsourced developers as having "basically got tasked with doing this type of work," so a separate tool felt redundant. The real question is whether your agency handling the site means nobody needs to find issues, and the answer depends on who tells the agency what's broken.
Yes. An agency builds and ships what it's asked to work on, but someone still has to spot the problems nobody reported. Over 90% of website errors are never reported, so a store that relies on tickets misses most of them. A tool that finds issues and hands them to the agency makes the agency's work count for more.
- An agency is a delivery partner. It works the queue it's given.
- Most site issues never reach that queue, because shoppers leave instead of reporting them.
- Finding issues, ranking them by revenue and handing them over with evidence is a separate job from building the change.
- Noibu's agents do the finding and drafting; the agency reviews and ships; you approve.
- Keep the agency. Give it a better queue.
Why isn't an agency enough to catch site issues on its own?
An ecommerce agency is set up to deliver work: build features, change themes, ship releases and answer tickets. Most agency contracts are scoped around requested work, so the agency acts on what the merchant or the agency's own QA notices. Problems that nobody notices never become tickets.
Shoppers are the people most likely to hit a broken checkout step, a payment form that won't submit or a page that freezes on an older phone. Over 90% of website errors are never reported, so those shoppers usually leave without saying anything. An agency waiting on reports is working from a small slice of what's actually going wrong.
Agency QA also has limits. A QA pass tests the paths a developer thinks of, on the devices and browsers the team has on hand. Real traffic covers far more combinations of device, browser, extension, payment method and network, and that's where the issues that only some shoppers hit tend to hide.
What does a tool that finds issues do that the agency doesn't?
A tool that finds issues watches real shopper sessions continuously and reports what's breaking, slowing down or losing orders. That's a different job from writing code. One job is deciding what to work on. The other is doing the work.
The most useful output for an agency is a short, ranked list: which issue, how many sessions it hits, how much revenue it puts at risk, and the evidence to reproduce it. A list like that replaces vague tickets ("checkout seems slow on mobile") with work an agency can scope, estimate and ship.
Does adding a tool mean replacing the agency?
No. Keeping the agency and adding a tool that finds issues is the usual pattern, not a sign that the agency is failing. The agency still owns the codebase, the release process and the judgment calls about how a change should be built. The tool supplies the list of what to work on and the proof behind each item.
Agencies are moving the same way. An AI-native ecommerce agency builds on agents that find and draft work, then puts its people on review, delivery and strategy. A merchant who brings that kind of tooling to the relationship is giving the agency better inputs, not competing with it.
How do Noibu's agents fit alongside an agency?
Noibu runs a team of supervised AI agents on the store's real traffic. The Bug Resolution agent identifies the top fixable issues, traces the root cause to the codebase and creates a pull request for review. The Performance agent measures Core Web Vitals from real shopper traffic, ranks the worst-performing page groups and stages a change for review. The CRO agent finds underperforming product pages and drafts rewrites to convert better.
Every agent follows the same loop: find, build, your approval, ship, measure. Nothing ships without approval, which is where the agency comes in. A pull request from the Bug Resolution agent goes into the repository the agency already works in, so the agency reviews it like any other change. The agents work in the Noibu console and in the AI tools teams already use, such as Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, through Noibu MCP.
For stores where the agency owns the repository, the access question is covered in how to connect AI agents to GitHub when you don't own the repo. For turning a finding into work the agency will pick up, see how to write a dev ticket from a site finding that an agency will act on.
How do you decide whether you need one?
Ask the agency three questions. How does it learn about issues that no shopper or staff member reported? How does it decide which issue costs the most revenue? How does it show that a change moved conversion after it shipped? If the honest answer to the first question is "when someone tells us," the store has a finding gap, and the agency can't close it alone.
- Most agency tickets start with "a customer emailed" or "someone on the team noticed."
- Nobody can say which open issue costs the most revenue.
- Conversion dips get explained weeks later, if at all.
- Mobile or single-browser problems surface only after a campaign underperforms.
- Changes ship, but nobody measures whether they moved orders.
Three or more of those usually means the agency is working hard on a partial list. The fix isn't a new agency. It's a steady supply of ranked, evidenced work.
What's the easiest way to test this without changing agencies?
Start with Noibu's free website audit. The agents run on the store's own data and rank the biggest issues and drop-offs, with the cause behind each. Share the results with the agency and compare them with its current backlog. Anything on the audit that isn't in the backlog is work nobody had found yet.
For how agencies themselves are adapting, read what an AI-native ecommerce agency is and whether you should worry if your ecommerce agency uses AI. To see how the agents work, visit the Bug Resolution agent page.
Frequently asked questions
We outsource development to an agency. Isn't a tool that finds issues redundant?
No. An agency builds and ships the work it is given, but most site issues never become tickets because shoppers leave instead of reporting them. A tool that finds issues supplies the work the agency would otherwise never hear about, ranked by revenue at risk.
Won't our agency see this as a threat?
Most agencies benefit from it. Ranked issues with evidence are easier to scope and ship than vague tickets, and the agency still owns review and delivery. Many agencies now build on AI agents themselves.
Who ships the changes if Noibu finds an issue?
The agency, or whoever owns the code. The Bug Resolution agent traces the root cause and creates a pull request for review, and nothing ships without approval. The agency reviews the pull request like any other change.
Does the agency need to give up repository access?
No. The agency keeps ownership of the repository and the release process. Agent pull requests arrive for review in the repository the agency already works in.
How can we test this without changing our agency setup?
Run the Noibu free website audit on the store's own data and compare its ranked issues with the agency's current backlog. Anything on the audit that is missing from the backlog is work nobody had found yet.
Key takeaways
- An agency delivers the work it is given; finding the work is a separate job.
- Over 90% of website errors are never reported, so ticket-driven queues miss most issues.
- The best agency input is a ranked list: the issue, sessions affected, revenue at risk and evidence.
- Keep the agency: Noibu's agents find and draft, the agency reviews and ships, the merchant approves.
- Test the gap with the free website audit before changing anything.
Noibu is AI for ecommerce operations, the always-on optimization system that keeps online stores running at their best. A team of supervised AI agents finds what's broken, slow, or leaking revenue, does the work, and hands results back for human approval. Trusted by retailers like Free People, Guess, Liquid I.V., and Ariat.
