Online Grocery Shopping: Raising Customer Satisfaction via QA Testing

Today, online grocery shopping is on the rise as retailers work around the clock to improve the digital customer experience via Quality Assurance (QA) testing campaigns. 

Across several markets including North America, Europe, and Asia, e-commerce sales are growing significantly as more and more consumers turn to their desktops and mobiles to do their grocery shopping. 

In the US, online grocery sales are expected to grow by 18% or nearly $20 billion in 2019 alone. Likewise, French online grocery sales are expected to increase from 10.2 billion euros in 2018 to 15.1 billion euros in 2023.

The growth of online grocery shopping apps and websites is being driven by multiple factors including the desire for convenience, evolving consumer behavior, and price/quality considerations.

There are many grocery retailers today that offer e-commerce mobile apps and websites that are designed to alleviate a number of traditional pain points for customers. One such retailer is Systeme U, a group of French supermarkets, which has made it a priority to develop its e-commerce app and website to better serve the needs of its customers.

Sales through Systeme U’s e-commerce website are expected to reach more than 600 million euros by the end of 2019; a 4% increase from 2018. Systeme U also hopes its e-commerce website will generate at least 1 billion euros in sales in the next 5 years.

Despite their ambition, the commercial success of any grocery shopping app or grocery shopping website is directly tied to quality and ability to customer satisfaction. As longtime partners, Systeme U recently collaborated again with StarDust to execute a test campaign to ensure their mobile app provided the best quality and service possible.

Client Testimonial 

Benjamin Routhe, Director of E-commerce Projects at Systeme U, shared his experiences working with StarDust.

During the latest evolution of the Courses U mobile app, what QA needs or challenges did you face?

After launching our app, we soon realized that we did face certain challenges based on the feedback or reviews we were receiving from customers who were using the app and experiencing some roadblocks.

As a result, we reached out to StarDust who we knew from experience was capable of planning and executing a test campaign that could uncover functional bugs as well as other flaws that hindered the overall user experience or customer satisfaction with the app.

It was also important for us to have a large panel of smartphones across various brands, models, and OS versions to account for bugs that are caused by fragmentation. Internally, we do not have an adequate collection of smartphones, tablets, or computers to effectively carry out a test across a large collection of smartphones to uncover any bugs that could hinder the app.

During the campaign, where did StarDust have to focus their efforts?

Well, the focus of the test was mainly on the customer journey and purchasing tunnel. We were concerned that some anomalies were tainting these aspects of our app and having a negative effect on its performance from an e-commerce perspective. So in terms of a specific need, we did need to test our app in a real-store setting to evaluate its functions and the user experience it offers to our customers while using our app in our stores.

This made it necessary to execute the campaign with testers that could go into one of our stores and use the app in the same manner as a customer from start to finish to uncover any bugs or flaws that could result in a negative experience.

What did you appreciate the most about StarDust?

The diversity of StarDust’s testers as well as the quality of the test results were the two aspects that I appreciated the most. We serve a diverse array of customers all over France so being able to call on a diverse collection of testers was really important.

The testers also brought a lot of quality to this project, which was clear to see in the amount of details they included in each bug ticket. With BugTrapp, each bug tickets included a detailed explanation. Screenshots and videos also provided visual evidence of how the bug affected the app as well as how to reproduce them.

The feedback the testers provided when it came to the app’s user experience was also clear in helping us to confirm what we expected. I can also add that the testers’ feedback did help us to prioritize bug fixes and take the necessary steps to improve the app.

Why would you recommend StarDust?

I recommend StarDust for their ability to plan and execute an effective test campaign that identified over 90 bugs in less than one week. It was also really important that the test provided the user feedback on our app that highlighted more subjective aspects that influenced the user experience. This was probably one of the most important aspects for us.

The responsiveness of StarDust is also worth mentioning. Their ability to plan and execute a test campaign in less than a week was really valuable in helping us stay on schedule.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention the quality of the bug tickets. I really appreciated having detailed bug tickets that made understanding the nature of each bug easier, which helped us to establish our post-test priorities.

Last but not least, the availability and flexibility of the StarDust team played a major role in the success of this project. A dedicated project manager was always available responding to our questions or concerns whenever they arose.

To learn more about the importance of software testing and the best practices for testing e-commerce mobile apps and websites, please do not hesitate to download our white paper, The Challenges of Testing E-commerce Sites .