When Trackfinite came to mind

I was building the Fantasmalia store and, being a developer, I kept going round and round the same question: which tools would help me understand what was happening inside it. I thought of what I would have thought of on any other project — Elastic, or something like it. But there was something different about this one, and it took me a while to see what.

It clicked while I was buying cat food

It happened at the store I always used, one of the best-known online pet shops. They required a login, and mine failed. I could not tell whether it was my fault, so I did what anyone does: reset the password. The problem came when I typed in the password I had just set and that did not work either. It was clearly not me.

I was a regular customer with a very simple ritual: once a month, the cat’s food. So I changed stores. I bought somewhere else and, as it turned out, a little cheaper.

The email I still keep

The next day the email arrived: “You have items in your cart.”

I keep it as the beginning of Trackfinite. It is the email everyone sends, automatic, identical for anyone who leaves something half done. What had happened to me was a technical failure, and that email said only one thing:

We got this wrong, we have no idea, and we are not even going to say sorry.

The three things that were never in one place

That was when the three things at the center of Trackfinite today came to mind:

• The friction an error creates, technical or not.
• Knowing what happened, and how it played out for that particular buyer.
• What you do about it.

And then it hit me: the error-tracking tools I had been looking at helped with one of the three. Google Analytics, with another. Mailchimp, with another. None of them knew what the others knew.

What comes next

In the next posts I will tell how those tools get joined up. Or how we used to join them ourselves, until Trackfinite came along.