Famous Smoke Shop’s COO unpacks how Noibu has transformed their ecommerce monitoring

Founded in 1939 in Midtown Manhattan as a family-owned business, Famous Smoke Shop is one of the largest online cigar stores in the United States. Known for its wide selection of cigars, humidors, cutters, lighters, & cigar accessories, Famous Smoke Shop promises the lowest prices and best deals on buying cigars online.

Famous Smoke Shop has been a happy Noibu customer since June 2022 and has been utilizing the platform to drive tangible ROI by resolving critical website errors and optimizing for frictionless customer experiences.

We recently sat down with John Lamberti, COO at Famous Smoke Shop to unpack what made his team choose Noibu for their ecommerce monitoring efforts, the wins they’ve had with the platform so far, and how they would compare Noibu to other similar tools.

What made Famous Smoke Shop choose Noibu?

During the trial period when Noibu’s tag was deployed on the Famous Smoke Shop website, a bunch of errors were detected that John’s team had no idea existed. They were particularly excited about how Noibu’s intuitive dashboard delivered the exact logic behind each detected error, the technical details required to reproduce and resolve it, as well as the corresponding revenue impact.

John emphasized that being an ecommerce business that receives millions of sessions per year, he needed a tool that could notify his development team of detected errors in real-time.

At the time when they were evaluating Noibu, Famous Smoke Shop was already using some of the most popular heatmapping and session recording tools to optimize their ecommerce experiences. However, none of them provided John’s team with the visibility and technical details required for his development team to be notified and take action in the moment the error occurred.

How were ecommerce site errors detected at Famous Smoke Shop before partnering with Noibu?

Before Famous Smoke Shop joined hands with Noibu, their dev team would have to rely on either errors reported by customers or the insights received from the minimal reporting offered by heat mapping and session recording tools to find bugs on the site.

At the time, John’s team was in the process of migrating their front-end commerce to Magento after using a legacy platform for over 15 years. Therefore, it was really important for them to zoom in on their site errors and address them before the migration to avoid making the same mistakes twice.

How did the error detection and resolution workflow evolve with Noibu?

John’s team follows two-week sprints and the errors flagged by Noibu quickly became a part of their sprint planning. Noibu tickets are assigned to developers based on the priority of the errors detected as well as the workload of the team. John emphasized that they always prioritize Noibu tickets on a bi-weekly basis to address errors as efficiently as possible.  

Noibu’s integration with Jira has been immensely useful for John’s team as it’s helped them save some missed opportunities and convert them into actionable solutions by creating a direct path for quick error resolution.

What’s the impact that Noibu has had on the business KPIs so far?

“If we just pull up our dashboard, you can see that hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of errors have already been resolved. Even millions in some cases. That part speaks for itself. If we wouldn’t have resolved these issues long-term, it would’ve been catastrophic for our top line.”

John highlighted that leveraging the Noibu platform has opened up so many opportunities in terms of how the team is able to discover and resolve errors. He elaborated that Noibu had greatly streamlined how they reported and addressed third-party errors to minimize their impact. Finally, the third biggest impact has been in terms of being able to optimize the site to make it faster and render quickly for every single device type and user.

Biggest wins that Famous Smoke Shop has had with Noibu

“The best part is being notified while the error is happening in real-time. From a QA standpoint, we no longer have to wait for our customers to notify us of site errors and then go and mimic what’s happening.”

John added that they can now rely on Noibu to automate error detection for their team, so they can just watch the session recording to pinpoint what exactly is happening and on which device types. Whether it is a specific browser, a particular piece of code, or a third-party piece of Javascript that could be misfiring—Noibu helps their team detect it instantly.

John attested to the fact that the biggest win for his team has been time savings. They no longer have to watch countless sessions trying to detect errors or wait for customer complaints to figure out what’s wrong with their site. Noibu has helped John’s team boost their error resolution efficiency by transforming how they approach site errors.

“We’re definitely a happy customer. I as well as my IT team see the long-term benefit of keeping Noibu as a partner, especially for the in-depth insights that the platform offers. Even though we’re going to be on a more stable platform (Magento), there are always issues that could pop up that could be a disadvantage for us and our customers.”

What gap does Noibu fill in the experience optimization tech stack?

The IT team at Famous Smoke Shop has experience using a couple of user behavior analytics tools to understand shopper behavior on their site. However, the team relies completely on Noibu for error discovery and technical insights into how to avoid hiccups in the shopper journey.

“Noibu is able to dive into areas that you may think are working but really could be missed opportunities for conversions. Could be a piece of Javascript misfiring, a broken link, or an image error - little things like that add up and lead to a loss in revenue. We’ve been notified many times of cart and checkout errors that we never would’ve known were happening."

John shared a recent example of how Noibu proved to be game-changing for their business. They recently updated their checkout flow and their payment gateway and were able to use Noibu to completely eliminate any errors in the new flow. John’s team relied on Noibu to detect any issues and monitor the page after they went live for any glitches.

Driving tangible ROI with Noibu

John emphasized that once his team was onboarded and understood how to derive value out of Noibu, it took them about 2-3 months to drive tangible ROI from the tool.

“The customer service that we get from our account representative at Noibu is probably the best we have across all of our third parties. The team’s doing a great job.”

In this case study, we explored how the IT team at Famous Smoke Shop has been leveraging Noibu to improve their error monitoring efficiency, reduce time to resolution, and overall reduce the negative impact of ecommerce errors.

To experience how Noibu can drive similar results for your ecommerce business, sign up for a free checkout audit from our experts to uncover what’s really happening under the hood of your site.