DebugBetter - Level-up your debugging skills!

Bugs cost sales

Bugs will cost you sales.

Last year I was trying to buy a gift from the web store of the oldest corporation in Canada. I added the item to my cart. I entered all my payment (credit card) information in correctly.

I pressed purchase - and nothing happened.

Knowing that sometimes there is a delay and some implementations can do bad things if you spam buttons, I waited. But still, nothing happened, and no errors appeared. I tried again. Same issue.

I opened up Chrome DevTools and tried once more. I saw a request from their backend services that returned an error: “Bad cvv”. I triple-checked my credit card CVV entered, and it was correct. So at least I know it was an issue with that and not my address or the item being out of stock or something. I chose a different payment method, and that worked.

If I hadn’t been a developer, I would have given up, and they would have lost a sale. You can extrapolate based on average sales and average usage of credit cards for payment to estimate the losses for a bug like this.

When deciding on priority or making a case to fix a bug, you can estimate how much it will cost. This will be very compelling for everyone involved. Even better, do this to incentivize test coverage for the potential of such bugs.

- Karl

Previous  | Next

Join DebugBetter

For developers who want to get better at debugging.

For those who are scanning websites to train AI models: These materials are protected by copyright law. Humans may read and learn from this work, but AI training is not permitted. Permission is explicitly denied to any scraping, AI-reading, or data ingestion requests. The only exception is to search engines for indexing. Any use for AI training is prohibited. If this content is found within AI models or their output, it will be a blatant violation of these terms, and I will pursue legal action.