How Creative Bag's COO ships his own production fixes with the Noibu AI Plugin

The Noibu AI Plugin connects Noibu’s ecommerce data directly to an AI assistant through an MCP connector, so anyone on a team can ask plain-language questions about their store and act on the answers in the same place. No dashboards to learn, no SQL, no waiting on a developer to turn an insight into a change.

To see what unlocks in practice, we spoke with Howie Shapiro, COO of Creative Bag, who runs an entire ecommerce operation without a single in-house developer.

The customer: Creative Bag

Creative Bag is a Toronto family business that has been making and selling packaging — bags, boxes, ribbon, tissue, bakery supplies — for more than 40 years. It runs two BigCommerce storefronts across Canada and the US, serving both B2B and B2C customers. What it doesn’t have is a development team.

“I wear many different hats,” says COO Howie Shapiro, who oversees operations, strategy, and the company’s entire ecommerce stack. Before Noibu, that meant site problems surfaced only when a customer complained, then waited in a queue for an outside developer.

“We’ve always taken a reactive approach instead of a proactive one. I know there are issues and friction on the site, but without an in-house dev team, I just can’t fix them all right away.”
— Howie Shapiro, COO, Creative Bag

AI-generated fixes, shipped by a non-developer

The plugin’s most striking capability for a team like Creative Bag is what happens after a problem is found. Using Noibu’s Speed and Error agents, Howie generated proposed code fixes and pushed them straight to the company’s GitHub as pull requests for review.

Two were validated and deployed to production — one improving homepage banner load speed, the other resolving a coupon analytics breakdown at checkout. For a COO who writes no production code himself, having an AI agent draft a deployable fix changed what was possible without hiring.

Work that used to require a developer, self-served

Beyond the agents, Howie used the plugin’s shipped skills to handle work that had always meant calling his agency.

• Orphaned-page cleanup: he found organic traffic landing on dead pages and set up 301 redirects himself.
• A session-attribute script: he passed customer email through as a session attribute so his CS team could identify shoppers and troubleshoot faster.
• A programmatic Help Code button: added to the contact page, normally a developer task.

“Normally this would require dev intervention, but I was able to do it pretty quickly. It lets me work faster, implement faster, and operate more efficiently.”
— Howie Shapiro, COO, Creative Bag

All told, in his first weeks on the plugin Howie shipped 6+ major changes without a developer, each one work that previously sat in an agency queue. Tasks that would have meant a multi-week wait now happen the same day.

Ask your data, build your own views

The plugin also let Howie build his own live orders dashboard, modeled on Noibu’s recent-orders view but tailored to exactly what he wanted to see, created by asking in plain language rather than briefing a developer.

“I love getting a view of today’s orders, or yesterday’s, or over a set period, and being able to see the UTM source, where these customers are actually coming from. That’s something I could never easily get before.”
— Howie Shapiro, COO, Creative Bag

Decisions that used to wait on an agency or a manual export now happen in the moment, because the question and the answer live in the same place.

The context: what the plugin helped him act on

The plugin’s value is sharpened by what Noibu surfaced underneath it. During a two-week proof of concept, Noibu identified the kind of silent failure a lean team would never catch on its own:

• $176K/mo in recoverable mobile revenue, with mobile converting at less than half the desktop rate.
• Over 1,000,000 JWT 404 errors in 15 days, none visible to the tool Creative Bag had been relying on.
• 246 checkout JavaScript errors blocking shoppers from selecting shipping and reaching payment.

The outcome: a different way of operating

What Howie describes most is a shift in how the business runs, from reacting to complaints to acting on data, and from waiting on developers to shipping changes himself.

“It’s opened up a whole new world in how my team and I think about AI. The possibilities, the curiosity, the willingness to test and explore. The companies that aren’t adopting it are going to fall behind. You have to get your feet wet.”
— Howie Shapiro, COO, Creative Bag

“Without Noibu and the AI Plugin, we’d be forced to go back to operating the way we did before, which meant being less efficient, making less informed decisions, and doing things by feel instead of by data.”
— Howie Shapiro, COO, Creative Bag

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.