- August 7, 2020
What is Ecommerce Testing?
E-commerce testing is pretty much exactly how it sounds. It involves testing an e-commerce (online shopping) platform. It helps to prevent errors on your site while adding value to the total product by providing a better overall service. e-commerce testing will ensure that your product contains reliable and quality software.
An important thing for e-commerce is for sites to stay up to date. As the online industry is forever adapting and evolving it is essential to stay up to date with your competitors. The only problem with changes and updates is if it slows down or breaks your site. One crucial thing with e-commerce is site speed and flexibility. These have been proven to greatly impact your customer buying rate at the end of the sales funnel.
Agile approach and software development outsourcing
In order to maintain a high-quality site that maximizes conversions while keeping your site updated, testing is key. It will ensure any update that damages conversions can be remedied as soon as possible.
Testing Challenges
Making regular updates is a requirement for e-commerce sites. It is also equally important to test any update. This way you can eliminate any bugs that may emerge from the update. All aspects of the site should be tested regardless if the update was only for a certain page.
Testing a full website manually can be quite challenging, not to mention pretty time-consuming. Manual testing will never fully be replaced but employing automated testing is the most effective and efficient way to test an e-commerce site. Automated testing will provide the developers with consistent data which will help them to eliminate any bugs that might be trouble for the site.
Types of QA Tests
There are several typical tests that can and should be automated. Usually, the tests you will automate will be regression tests that will assess the performance of your site functionality.
Performance Tests
Almost half of the users on your site will abandon it if the site takes longer than three seconds to load. Yep, you read that right, so the phrase “every second counts” really does apply to your site performance. It is crucial to test that your updates do not affect the speed of your site. Thankfully, this performance test can be automated to ensure new updates will not hinder your site speed.
Another bonus is the fact that automated testing will make it easier to assess the sites speed when it is under large amounts of traffic. This is especially helpful around the major shopping times such as Christmas periods, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday.
Functional Tests
You can use automated tests to efficiently assess both existing and new functions. This includes features such as new buttons, banners, pop up windows, and other functions that are designed to better direct shoppers or improve conversions. These tests can be automatically completed across several different devices at the same time. This ensures the quality of your site’s functions across a range of different devices.
As there is an increasing number of users who are buying products on their smartphones being able to test across different devices is crucial. There are dozens of different tests that will be run simultaneously to ensure that functions are running properly. Additionally, automated tests ensure there is more consistency in testing. It saves testers repeating the same mind-numbing tests daily.
While updating e-commerce sites is essential, the importance of testing each and every update cannot be overlooked. With the incorporation of automated testing, more e-commerce sites can maximize their potential.