How Browns Shoes Keeps Confidence in Its Site Experience While Replatforming to Shopify

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With Noibu as its real-time source of truth, Browns Shoes monitors release health, resolves customer disputes with session evidence, and commits to “parity or improvement” as it migrates to Shopify.

• Customer: ‍Browns Shoes, a leading Canadian footwear and accessories retailer‍
• ‍Product: Issue monitoring, session capture, performance monitoring, site health dashboards, release monitoring and Page Analysis‍
• Speakers:‍
  
  • Tammy Kovac, Director of Retail and Commerce Platforms

The challenge: hold the line on experience through a high-stakes migration

Browns Shoes was preparing for one of the biggest technical moves a retailer can make — a full replatform from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify. A migration of that scale touches every part of the shopping experience, and the team set a clear bar for itself: parity or improvement. Nothing about the customer experience could quietly get worse in the move.

That bar only holds if you can see what’s actually happening on the site. Beyond the migration, the team needed dependable visibility into day-to-day release health, and a way to resolve customer-service and fraud disputes with real evidence rather than guesswork. Heading into a replatform, losing that visibility wasn’t an option.

"We hold every cutover to a high performance standard. Our goal is always parity or improvement, and if the data shows we're falling short, we'll roll back the change until we're confident we've met that standard."
— Tammy Kovac, Director of Retail and Commerce Platforms, Browns Shoes

The solution: one real-time source of truth for site health

Noibu was already a partner to Browns when Tammy Kovac, Director of Retail and Commerce Platforms, joined, embedded in how the business keeps tabs on its site. Today her team relies on Noibu across the board — issue monitoring, session capture, site performance tracking, and post-release monitoring — with a single, real-time view of how the site is behaving.

That shared view matters most around releases. During a recent three-month push focused entirely on performance improvement, the team trended impacts in Noibu almost daily, using it as the reference point for whether each change was moving the site in the right direction, rather than reacting to problems after the fact.

The work paid off: by early May, the team had brought overall loading speed to roughly 2.2 seconds and site performance to its best level in 90 days — firmly in the green, and approaching Noibu's top tier.

In focus: catching a regression before it spread

Not every problem announces itself. When a release quietly degraded loading on the men’s-sneakers pages by roughly 4.27 seconds, the dip was easy to miss on a quick manual check — it was confined to desktop, about a quarter of traffic. Noibu surfaced the regression and pinpointed the cause, flagging time-to-first-byte and render delay as the culprits, so the team could route it straight to engineering rather than waiting for it to show up in customer complaints.  

It’s the everyday value of a real-time source of truth: turning a vague “something feels off” into a specific, device-level diagnosis the team can act on.

In focus: turning session evidence into fraud protection

Noibu also does work that goes beyond a traditional monitoring dashboard. From time to time, Browns needs to resolve a customer dispute — for example, a chargeback where details of an order are in question. Getting these right matters for the business and for genuine customers alike. 

Because Browns has visibility into how orders move through the site in Noibu, the team can confirm whether a transaction took place as described and resolve these cases with facts rather than guesswork. In one recent instance, that visibility gave the team enough to settle a disputed claim confidently. It’s another way a reliable, shared view of the site helps Browns keep decisions grounded in evidence.

“The playbacks empower our Customer Service and Loss Prevention teams to deny or validate such claims. In this particular case, we were able to combat a fraud claim and provide enough evidence to prove certain behaviours were taken online.”
— Tammy Kovac, Director of Retail and Commerce Platforms, Browns Shoes

Confidence through the Shopify migration

As Browns moves to Shopify, the team has intentionally paused deployments to protect a stable production environment and keep focus on the migration itself. That pause is temporary by design. Once live on Shopify, the plan is to bring performance monitoring back in more rigorously — standing up dashboards that draw sharper attention to changes in performance and browsing behaviour.

Throughout the cutover, the commitment stays the same: parity or improvement, with Noibu as the check. If the data shows a drop in performance, the team is prepared to pull back the cutover rather than ship a worse experience.

What it would mean to lose that visibility

When asked what would happen if that real-time view of site health disappeared — especially heading into the migration — Tammy was direct about the cost.

For a team navigating a replatform, that combination — the confidence to move, the visibility to catch problems early, and a shared set of facts to align around — is exactly what keeps a migration of this scale on track.

Looking ahead: from reactive to prescriptive

Once Browns is live on Shopify, the team plans to move from reactive monitoring toward a more prescriptive approach to releases and improvements, grounded in real user trends. The goal is to understand patterns like which release timing tends to produce more successful deployments, and to anticipate the likely impact of a change before it ships.

It’s a shift from watching what happened to guiding what happens next, and it’s where Browns and Noibu go from here.

About Noibu

Noibu is the leading ecommerce analytics & monitoring platform, purpose-built to help retailers protect and grow online revenue. By unifying site monitoring, experience analytics, and conversion growth opportunities in a single pane of glass, Noibu gives ecommerce, engineering, and product teams everything they need to understand what’s happening across the shopping journey, prioritize what matters most, and act on the opportunities that drive growth.

Learn more at www.noibu.com.