Top E-Commerce Consumer Frustrations and How Streamlined AI Tools Can Help

The importance of maintaining high-quality, bug-free websites has never been more critical. A 2024 Chubb survey found that e-commerce sites had a trust rating of 48 percent vs. physical stores, which had a leading 70 percent. Much of this was due to financial fraud (75 percent) or lost payments resulting from glitches in the purchasing process (55 percent).

Website bugs can lead to significant business losses, damage to brand reputation, and a poor user experience. Broken links, slow load times, and functionality errors affect more than 70 percent of websites. The worst part? Users detect 85 percent of website bugs, when developers should be fixing these during the testing phase.

Here are three of the most common consumer frustrations, the types of bugs that cause them, and the measures businesses are taking to mitigate them.

Financial Fraud is an Outcome of Security Bugs

Security-related bugs account for 15 percent of all reported bugs. These include vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and improper authentication mechanisms. E-commerce sites with critical software vulnerabilities or that neglect regular patch security updates are 12 times more likely to become targets for digital skimming.

Many brands such as PayPal, IBM Watson, Meta, and Siemens use artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze website code in real time to identify malicious scripts or code injections that could be used for skimming. AI can monitor website traffic for anomalies, such as sudden spikes in traffic from specific IP addresses or unusual user behavior, which may indicate a skimming attack. This real-time threat detection is critical as hackers become increasingly devious with their attacks.

Slow Performance Sends Customers to Competitors

Performance issues, such as slow load times, unresponsive pages, and high resource consumption account for 30 percent of reported bugs. These issues are critical in an era when users expect fast and seamless browsing experiences. The Aberdeen Group found that 40 percent of consumers would shop at another site if pages took longer than three seconds to load.

User interactions are dynamic and diverse, making it difficult for developers to replicate every possible authentic test scenario, leading to incomplete performance assessments. AI-powered load testing, on the other hand, is more flexible than predetermined, script-based testing. It can learn from browsing patterns, session durations and transaction volumes and generate realistic user scenarios that can adapt and respond to changing conditions. This helps developers get a more accurate picture of how a system will perform outside of the test environment.

UX Functionality Bugs Lead to Abandoned Carts

Errors in a website’s functionality, such as forms not submitting correctly, broken shopping carts, or blunders in dynamic content loading severely impact the user experience, leading to frustration and site abandonment. A 2023 Contentsquare survey found that promotions not working at checkout caused 33 percent of abandoned carts.

Consequently, discovering bugs after websites go live can be up to 100 times more expensive to fix than one caught during the initial development phase. As such, developers are looking for ways to catch issues early in the development cycle, with one approach being to adopt continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices. With ongoing tests, updates and fixes, developers can identify and correct bugs faster. When developers commit code changes, the CI/CD pipeline automatically triggers a build process.

As part of this process, regression tests are executed to ensure the new code doesn't negatively impact existing features. Since regression testing is repetitive, automated testing is especially effective — and a new wave of AI testing can validate key functionalities like registration, login, and order placement with no setup or pre-fed test scenarios required

E-commerce has become the norm for the everyday shopper and the technologies available to advance these sites have risen with demand. However, with so many offerings on the table, e-retailers must be mindful to keep their focus. They must implement tools and features with clear purpose and continuously monitor them to do the job they were designed for. Addressing top consumer concerns such as financial fraud, slow loading times, and usability are good starting points to help build a reputable site people trust. With many elements to test and prioritize, AI will play an increasingly large role in speeding these processes up when used correctly.

Maryam A. Hassani is the co-founder and CEO of Zealous, AI-native framework for medium to large software companies.