The COVID-19 outbreak has brought a radical change in consumer behaviors all over the world. Today, people love online shopping more than offline. But when it comes to giving the best customer experience during holiday seasons, most retailers face performance issues and difficulty while dealing with massive traffic on their online outlets.
In the past, the total sales were divided into physical and online shopping. However, the trend has started to lean more towards online shopping. According to the research made by Oberlo, approximately 2.14 billion individuals worldwide are expected to buy goods online in 2021.
Similarly, global eCommerce sales are expected to reach $4.891 trillion. Thus, in this case, improving the performance of the eCommerce application is the greatest need. Otherwise, it would be tough for you to generate the expected number of sales. Moreover, in case of website crash issues or performance bottlenecks, your users will take a few seconds to leave your website.
If you have built the eCommerce app for generating good revenue, you should consider eCommerce application testing to ensure all the website pages are working accurately. Also, with effective eCommerce app testing services, you can test the complete workflow of your application that would include:
- Login/ Signup Forms
- Search Functionality of the Product
- Sorting Features in the Website
- Applying Filters on the Product Range
- Add/Remove to the Shopping Cart
- Check Out Process
- Post Reviews on the Products
- Payment Gateway and Payment Processing
- Generation of Order Number & Invoice
Apart from that, you can easily test the load of your web application and analyze how well your eCommerce website will handle the load and how quickly the product pages will load and display the necessary images.
Besides, how it will manage traffic spikes and identify potential performance loopholes. For example, we would like to know the story of Flipkart’s Big Billion Day Sale’s Epic Failure that happened in 2015. During that time, this eCommerce Provider introduced the Mega Sale to its customers. Yet, many people were dissatisfied because of the limited stocks. Furthermore, crash issues occurred several times due to massive traffic, which made many orders get canceled mysteriously.
Thus, if your brand is famous all across the world. Still, it doesn’t matter because if you give a poor customer’s experience, users will leave you and move to those platforms where they can get the best shopping experience and buy goods without any technical issues.
Consequently, if you want to save yourself from shitting complaints, which the FBI receives 3,000 to 4,000 times every day, you should test your eCommerce application for sure. Also, you should check out some Key Factors that are necessary to understand before initiating eCommerce application performance testing.
To help you know what factors you should consider while testing the performance of eCommerce applications, we have highlighted some points in the bullet form.
What to Look for While Testing the Performance of your E-Commerce Applications
Mobile Testing
We are living in the era of mobile-first age where your customers want to visit your website through their smartphones. For more customers, if the business is not mobile-based, then according to them, the brand does not properly exist. The purpose of performance testing for mobile is to ensure that your site is working as intended and it doesn’t face crash issues under peak loads.
However, one of the biggest hurdles in mobile testing is to make the website compatible with a wide variety of devices, platforms, and networks. If the site is not suitable to run on various devices, then you should address performance issues and consider load generation software to simulate peak loads and make the application ideal for most possible platforms.
Monitor Performance Across Geographies
When choosing eCommerce application testing services, as an E-retailer, you should ensure that the geographical location of your customers does not influence web performance. For this, one should test the workflow of an app to assure that it will give a satisfactory performance to the broad customer base.
Especially if you are planning to introduce holiday season deals or grand sales discounts on your site, you should first go with eCommerce application testing to improve your application’s performance since it will help you deliver a good customer experience.
Transactional Testing
Everyone knows that eCommerce apps deal with the highest number of transactions because people buy online and pay for their products through online payment gateway options. Thence, to help them make transactions safely, it is necessary to assure that the site will work appropriately while sending payments across devices and browsers, and there will be no crash or site load issues arise on the web page.
Additionally, one should pay huge attention to each user path and perform transactional testing to confirm that the site will give optimal transaction processing speed. Otherwise, it would be challenging for you to meet the targets because when critical operations fail, people experience a huge impact on their sales. Therefore, in order to retain quality and to fulfill the needs of your app, you should think about performance testing of your eCommerce applications.
Cloud-Based Testing
The cost of repeatable performance testing is high. Due to this, some companies choose Cloud-based testing as an alternative option because it doesn’t require additional hardware while simulating as many users. Moreover, using cloud testing is one of the affordable solutions when it becomes difficult to bear the expense of performance testing. On the other hand, with cloud testing, you can ensure that there will be minimum set up required to get the testing done as per geographically diverse locations.
Additional Tips
For an ECommerce Website, one should concentrate on those test scripts that are able to
- Create random products
- Create random orders
- Randomly create customer accounts
- Allow making changes in the admin interface (configuration changes & while creating categories).
The above steps are given for baseline testing. After that, you should run the test for monitoring response time, the number of errors, latency period, and the number of hits per second. Similarly, once the test has been done, you can perform re-testing to analyze how many users or visitors visit to your page in a specific time or duration.
Thereafter, you can think about duration testing to increase the duration of the test load and identify unforeseen issues, memory leaks, or application restart problems.
The Crux
Remember that different types of performance testing are popular in the market, such as Load Testing, Scalability Testing, Stress Testing, Soak & Spike Testing, Availability Testing, Configuration Testing. However, it is your process requirement and goals that you must understand to aim in the right direction.
Thus, based on your requirement, you can run different types of performance tests and improve your site’s quality. However, if you are planning to perform load test only, then you need to understand that load testing is very complex and it requires a pool of testers to check all possible optimizations and variables.
Similarly, half of the success depends on how better the load test you perform. Make sure the downtime of your site should be good, and one should release the app after the completion of app testing.
Otherwise, it can negatively impact your customer loyalty and revenue. Thus, whenever you need to enhance the performance of your website, go through all the aforementioned factors to help you support the accomplishment of performance testing goals. With these factors in mind, testers can perform rigorous testing on the eCommerce application and ensure that the end product becomes more stable, scalable, and faster.