It is important to understand how the market has changed during the past years when we talk about ecommerce product testing. Since the pandemic times, the trust towards online shopping has increased even more: the global ecommerce market grew in demand by 15% in 2021. At the same time, many more businesses went online which made customers more picky. The more websites are out there, the more choices customers have, and the pickier they become. The average time people spend on a website has steadily increased to 10.56 minutes in 2021, compared to 10.07 minutes in 2019. Great websites make people stay longer, which increases your chance to become their №1 choice.
Testing your ecommerce website is beneficial for many reasons, from building understanding of user behavior, to scaling your business with less risks. As a full-cycle software testing company, we understand the value testing can give to the e-commerce.
In this article, UTOR shares these insights with you, guiding you from benefits you can get to challenges you may face.
Benefits of a Proper QA in Online Shopping Projects
Enhance user engagement
In an online shopping platform, your key goal is to offer customers an experience that will lead them to purchase. The testing that serves such goals is called UX testing. Once you build a satisfactory user experience, the engagement will also grow. The experience, though, includes many parts: security, purchase process, loading speed, shopping cart usage, and more. Testing lets you ensure the quality goals are met and customers will have near to flawless experience.
Eliminate risks
Your website or an application will change along with your business. No matter if changes are small or large, its implementation can lead to flaws and, eventually, losses. With the proper QA process, you can test all changes in advance and make sure everything works as needed before making any changes to your e-commerce website or application. If you neglect testing at this stage, you can lose customers who will not be able to search through your website or make a purchase if the new version is not working properly. Quite often specialists focus on the new functionality while missing out that it can influence old features as well. Automation testing helps to avoid such risks.
Rise conversion rates
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that convert into leads and make a call to action on the website or application.
Users adore superior website experience, and they are more likely to come back when the previous interaction with the website was great. Using the advantage of testing, you can not only eliminate current bugs but also create a ground for more sales. You can work on improving your page speed load, ensure that the user journey up to the call to action is clear, make sure all forms and buttons lead to the correct page.
Challenges You Can Face During eCommerce Testing
- Simulating customer data is vital during testing, as specialists need to cover all functionality and work thorough with all the test cases.
- You should choose an automating integration scenario type that will cover everything from the homepage up to the payment gateway. It is challenging to choose technologies and automation principles by yourself, as the “automate everything” approach will eventually lead you to collapse.
- Compliance with security guidelines must be followed to safeguard customer data and integrity. These guidelines must include confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, encryption, and availability policies.
- Compliance with accessibility standards is worth considering, as it ensures that customers from other countries and locations will be able to interact with your website. Make sure they have accurate, adapted content for them and all cultural differences are taken into account.
- Not everyone understands the difference between reliability and scalability, which is important to understand in which cases such testing is accurate. We usually test scalability on clouds and on-premise. Scalability is checked to ensure the website can expand its possibilities and scale despite the number of requests. Reliability checks how much the website can handle without crashing and should be checked on every device.
Testing Types that E-commerce Project Needs
Below, we listed testing types that our clients are usually looking for in an ecommerce website testing. The better you test your website or an application, the better your website is, and the more loyal customers you are able to attract.
Compatibility with browsers
QAs should check compatibility with all browsers at different platforms (Mac, Linux, Windows) and cover testing of specific extensions. Besides, they should pay attention to testing on mobile devices to meet market standards.
Session Management
During such testing, specialists should pay attention to user roles and permissions. Many roles and accesses need to be created and managed, including admins, customers, customizable permissions, and more. If you have various roles on your platform, make sure to test each one of them.
Content Analysis
This part is usually checked during the simulation on customer data. We create test cases and enter the data that allows us to check the functionality of the displayed content.
Availability
We test this type only if we deal with a self-hosted solution. If you build your platform with a cloud provider (Amazon, Google, SAP, etc.), then availability should not be tested.
Back-up and Recovery
During this testing, it is important to check backup failure and fault tolerance.
Order processing and purchasing
As both actions are the last ones in the user journey, specialists should cover the testing to check shopping cart functionality, order and payments processing, as well as order tracking.
Login and Security
One of the vital parts to check: security is something you should not compromise on. Login lets users use your service and additional benefits, which build loyalty and increase sales.
Performance testing
It includes load, stress, volume, and scalability testing. The last one is especially important for the cloud.
Mobile testing
Checking how compatible a website is with mobile devices is also crucial nowadays: over 54% of traffic comes from mobile.
READ MORE: Mobile Automation Testing: Where Do You Start?
Web Page Elements Worth Testing
We’ve listed primary elements you should check when testing your ecommerce platform — all of them are vital for the performance and can lead to issues if not tested properly.
- General
First of all, you should focus on testing all pages users will actively interact with. It includes
the home and login pages in which you should check the interaction quality of the homepage, how intuitive the design and navigation are, and detect any issues that can arise during the login process. Interaction quality implies how customers perceive the quality of the webpage based on how convenient it is for them to find information and products they need.
- Search
This feature is widely used for ecommerce: even if you structure products well and make them easy-to-follow, it is still easier to look for a product in a search bar. QAs should make separate categories for the search, such as product name/brand name. Also, it is worth checking if you can use filters based on other parameters and ensure the customer can search for a product on any page.
- Payments
Payment is an aspect you cannot compromise on as it is the last stage of the user journey — a path users take to reach their goal at your website. If the payment does not go through, most likely you will lose the customer. To avoid this, make sure specialists check how different payment options work from the beginning till the end, perform security testing, the return page after the purchase, and payment confirmation if applicable.
- Shopping Cart
Shopping cart also requires thorough testing, considering how many items can be added and seen in the cart window, how to remove items from the cart, checking if shipping costs are applied correctly and whether coupons can be applied correctly.
How to Improve Your Ecommerce QA Testing process?
Keep various scenarios in mind
As your business is present online, you should understand that people of various ages, cultural backgrounds, physical and mental ability can visit your website. This is why noticing cultural differences and considering them during the testing process can be a great start towards scaling.
Execute performance tests as much as possible
Performance testing checks how well your website is handling an additional user load to see what may cause it to crash. This way, implementing performance testing in early stages can help you eliminate risks and avoid issues that can take lots of your time and money.
Focus on security and reliability
Security and reliability are worth improving at every stage. The more stable and secure your ecommerce website becomes, the better it does for the image of your company.
Consider QA audit to find potential bottlenecks
QA audit is a valuable process that lets you evaluate how well your quality assurance process works, based on best practices. It is one of the best ways to prevent issues and eliminate surprises on your way. You can read more about the QA audit in the article if you want to build thoughtful processes for your product.
Summing Up
UTOR covers all testing types that are related to the quality assurance and ecommerce web testing — you can check our services page to find out more. If you do not find a testing type you were looking for, let us know and will find a custom solution for you.
If you are ready to move forward and start strengthening your website as early as possible, book a QA audit. You will get an action plan that will show you what tests you need to perform for your ecommerce project.
