Why is testing important for eCommerce?

Posted by Anastasia on January 15th, 2021

Now are very harsh and complicated times for business and their owners. Covid-19 has changed our life and behavior. Entrepreneurs who adapted to new conditions could save their business. 

Many people around the globe are forced to stay home and keep a social distance. Some governments take strict rules and limit the working of shops and public places. Pandemic has a huge negative impact on business.

But the good news is that nowadays people can buy through the internet. And the pandemic is facilitating growing online shopping and consumers' behavior evolved. The average number of online deals in 2020 drastically increased compared with 2019. U.S. Department of Commerce reported that e-commerce sales grew more than 30% between the first and second quarter of 2020. 

Moreover, according to Salesforce research, 58% of customers are planning to purchase more even after the pandemic. Also, research showed that customers want a better online shopping experience. 88% of respondents claimed they are expecting that companies will implement the best digital decision to make shopping convenient and seamless.  

Importance of testing for e-commerce projects

As the e-commerce market grows, so do consumer expectations. Customers want better web design, usability, and the absence of risks. Companies that understand the importance of consumer website usability are investing in robust digital solutions. Companies that ignore the client's requirements or save money easily lose both.

The main reason for e-commerce testing:

  1. Increase the conversion rate. Failures and bugs can be a reason for the high bounce rate. Stable functionality ensures a seamless customer journey and brings more profits. Many bugs are associated with a cart and customers who can't pay or finish orders due to failures leave the site. Without testing, you don't know which kind of problems your clients face. However, after each code changes or adding new features, bugs can happen, so it's important to make continuous testing. 

  2. Ensure website stability. High web traffic and lack of website infrastructure capacity can cause downtime and common failures. The testing capacity of the website can help find out whether the site copes with high traffic and prevent crucial problems. Performance testing services find out bottlenecks and problems that cause unstable work. It allows prevent downtimes and ensure website access for all customers.

  3. Prevent security problems. Usually, e-commerce stores keep private data of their customers as bank card information, telephone numbers, addresses, etc. Hackers can steal clients' information and leak it to the web or can blackmail site owners and ransom. Testing can find bottlenecks and vulnerable spots in systems to make hacking impossible.

  4. Ensure workability on various devices and platforms. Nowadays, people have a diversity of devices for online ordering. Research shows that 50% of web traffic on e-commerce sites was made from mobile devices. So a mobile app or mobile version for an e-commerce project is necessary. But the main problem is that there are a huge number of devices with different size screens, operation systems with different requirements. Testing helps to ensure that a web or mobile app is usable and works, looks good on many devices.

What kinds of testing are necessary for e-commerce? 

Let's consider the main kind of testing that you need for seamless e-commerce website work.

  1. Performance testing. There is research that shows that high load site speed leads to a higher conversion rate. In other words, customers like fast sites and prefer ordering and interacting with them. Slow load speed can be caused by many factors as the amount of traffic or quality of hosting. Moreover, a high amount of traffic can lead to site downtime completely. Such an issue is expensive for sire owners. For example, retailer Costco lost about million for 16 hours of downtime on Thanksgiving sale 2019. Performance testing services identify a set of parameters as speed, scalability, stability, resource usage under the particular load. Such testing creates standards that are appropriate to a particular kind of e-commerce business. With these standards, owners can be sure that their website can cope with a high amount of traffic, expands in the long run easily, gets better optimization, and so on. 

  2. Penetration testing. Many owners of small or mid-sized businesses assume they can't be in the spot of cyber hackers. But the truth is that 58% of businesses with less than 1000 employees experienced cyberattacks. It's happened because small business websites are less protected than a site like Amazon, or haven't security strategy at all. Invaders can not only steal sensitive data but damage important documentation, delete orders, or overall block site and cause its downtime. The main risk is that many small can't get over after a cyberattack and shortly close. The main goal of penetration testing is to find vulnerabilities and bottlenecks that can be loopholes for invaders and eliminate them with a development team. Overall penetration testing it's a simulating of a cyberattack, thus you can identify and prioritize risks for website security strategy.

  3. Functional testing. This kind of testing helps to ensure that every function and feature of the website works according to system requirements. Most profit damageable failures happen in the website shopping cart and during the checkout process. The most common bugs are the impossibility to add a commodity to the cart, inconsistency between price and amount of products, order confirmation without verifying payment, etc. A major task to test different user scenarios, as an example for authorized and unauthorized users, to ensure that all functions on the site work correctly. 

Sum up 

The E-commerce business market is growing and evolving. Implementing the best testing strategies can increase profits and customer satisfaction.

 

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Anastasia

About the Author

Anastasia
Joined: August 12th, 2020
Articles Posted: 1