Black Friday : Testing is Crucial

It’s Black Friday and Jane Doe wakes up and goes to the Macy’s website to shop online and hoping to have good deals. After typing “macys.com” in the search bar, a message appears and asks her to wait ten seconds before it refreshes automatically and finally ends up on the homepage website. The reason for this is that the website traffic had increased more than usual.

Until that time, Jane Doe is biding her time. As soon as the website is redirected to the homepage, she finally starts shopping. She now tries to add items to her shopping cart but it doesn’t work. She’s unable to buy any items.

This story could be fiction but in this case, it is not. As a matter of fact, this happened in November 2016 to millions of Americans on Macy’s website and on other websites during Black Friday.

What is Black Friday?

Black Friday is the day that follows Thanksgiving Day which offers special promotions. It traditionally started in United States. And because Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year, it started to spread all over Canada which later become worldwide.

Black Friday used to take place only on a Friday, but it’s not a one-day event anymore. Black Friday sales have now extended to the entire weekend until Monday which is now call Cyber Monday which is dedicated to online shoppers.

Black Friday: An important economic stake

 Black Friday is one of the most popular events in terms of shopping. On this day, companies see their turnover significantly increase. Whereas stores such as malls, hypermarkets, used to be the preferred distribution channel to shop. Today, clients prefer to shop online. In 2016, $3.34 billion have been spent online on Black Friday.

So, more than a mere formality, testing before the event of Black Friday has become essential for companies.

How to test?

 Preparations for Black Friday are demanding and it requires putting a lot effort into it by setting goals, organized logistics, etc... All these efforts, time, and energy to prepare will be useless if your website and/ or your app crashes. Ask Quidco.

Tests for Black Friday are not to be made overnight. Testing would be a major strategy adopted of an online activity that will respond best.

 Part of the time spent will be concentrate on the meaning of objectives/goals and targets. To do this:

•  Statistics concerning the website traffic will be analyzed to identify user’s behavior.
• The objectives/goals will be determined by the modification viewed and the marketing effort on the previous year of Black Friday.

The issue is to confront the website/application to realistic situations to see if it is capable to deal with high traffic levels.

To do this, a test plan will be set.

The meaning of a test plan is an important step. A part of it will be kept for the retesting phases. This is the basis for formally testing any software/products for this event. This is will ensure that the changes made will be successful.

However, the test team (testers, analyst, QA, project manager) must contribute by listing which test is required.

Besides system testing (load testing, stress testing, performance testing, …), functional testing plays an important role because it verifies the website /application has no bug. Each functionality of the website/application must run perfectly on the designated day. The following functionality will be tested:

• Shopping cart and checkout: the shopping journey (add to cart, checkout, email confirmation, …) must be reviewed several times to make sure that nothing hinders it. It would be highly disadvantageous that the “Add to cart” function does not work well and thus it won’t allow clients to shop online, as it happened to Tesco.
• Discounts and coupons: discounts and coupons allow clients to benefit from reductions and savings. A typing error or a coupon badly configured could lead to chaos. As a result, it will let you focus on fixing your bugs which will lead you by seeing orders pass by you.

Non-regression testing will verify that whether the changes have not brought other defects somewhere else to the website/ application.

Please note: since the consumers shop on different devices (tablets, smartphones, etc…), testing should run on different devices on different operating systems. Also, you will want to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly because most people shops on their mobile.

At the end of the tests, results will have to be analyzed. All errors found will be corrected and tests will be reviewed to see if the adjustment has not made other changes. As mentioned before, the re-testing phase is extremely important.

Finally, load testing should not be your final decision of the test phase. When Black Friday is over, you should continue testing.

And if you’re still hesitating, remember this: the cost of a bug or a traffic site on your website or your application will lead to a downturn on your reputation and the loss of your clients will go toward your competitors. As famous quotes: Time is money, you will lose sales and money which will lead you to thousands of dollars. Thus, it is important for you to adopt a proactive attitude and to avoid those problems. It will be less beneficial than setting tests.

Do you want to know more? Our white paper on the challenges of testing e-commerce sites should be a good resource for you ;-)