Testing E-commerce Apps & Sites: How to Provide a Frictionless Black Friday

To make the most of Black Friday, there are several actions that retailers should take to ensure their websites and applications provide a grade-A user experience. To help, we compiled a rigorous QA checklist designed to guide and enable retailers to avoid a number of e-commerce pitfalls: slow-loading pages, buggy functionalities, and even full-on crashes.

What's at Stake? 

For every retailer, getting Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the end-of-the-year sales, which can make up 25 percent or more of their total sales, right is crucial. According to Adobe Analytics, online shoppers spent $9 billion on Black Friday, a 21 percent jump from 2019. Services like in-store and curbside pickup also grew 52 percent as many Black Friday shoppers avoided in-store shopping. 

On Cyber Monday, online shoppers spent a record $10.8 billion, representing a 15 percent increase from 2019. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that smartphones accounted for more than 40 percent of total online sales between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday! 

Again, in 2021, sales are expected to increase making Black Friday and Cyber Monday critically important for many retailers' bottom line. To take full advantage of this opportunity, retailers must properly test their websites and applications. 

By using this QA checklist, discover what retailers can do to improve the stability, responsiveness, and overall quality of their applications and websites between now and the end-of-the-year sales period. 

Using Real Mobile Devices for UAT Manual Testing 

For Black Friday, websites and applications undergo several changes: the creation of new landing pages, the addition of new banners, modules, and more. To provide digital shoppers with a bug-free experience, it is important to carry out user acceptance tests (UAT) with real mobile devices to uncover defects that emulators can fail to capture. 

Website and application testing is significantly improved when using real smartphones, which continue to be a major channel for customers looking to shop online, find product information, compare prices, and much more.

Analyze the End-To-End Digital Customer Journey to Ensure a Flawless Cart Transaction Process

Offering a great digital experience requires brands to evaluate the end-to-end digital customer journey including the checkout process. By testing these elements, retailers can eliminate any flaws that can discourage customers along the digital customer journey or prevent them from making a purchase. 

Evaluate the User Experience (UX) - Must be Frictionless

70% of consumers abandon purchases due to a poor user experience. Properly testing applications and websites can enable retailers to offer customers a bug-free and frictionless shopping experience across all channels. 

Implement Performance Testing

According to Forbes, a retail website that crashes for one hour can account for millions in lost sales. In anticipation of a surge of traffic on Black Friday, use performance testing to evaluate the speed, responsiveness, stability of e-commerce apps and websites to uncover flaws before they cause significant damage. 

Performance Testing Advice: What Are Your Performance Objectives?

• Determine release readiness: Predict the performance characteristics of an application in production and assess performance concerns prior to the release. 
• Infrastructure adequacy: Establish the stability and capacity of the platform to manage hundreds of users over time still provide adequate performance. 
• Baseline comparison: Verify the baseline or performance requirements before and after software or infrastructure changes. 
• Application tuning: Analyse the behavior of an application at different load levels, identify bottlenecks, and implement changes to software or infrastructure. 

Test Payment Process and Services

Payment processing systems and services are critical to the success of every retailer’s website or mobile application. Technical issues that block even just 10 percent of transactions will result in significant losses. Testing payment systems should be a top priority to guarantee shoppers can easily make purchases using a variety of supported payment methods across all channels.

Assess Contactless Process/Curbside pickup

Between buy online pickup in-store (BOPIS) and curbside pickup, the pandemic has accelerated omnichannel experiences in retail. Testing these services is the best way to locate major anomalies that can disrupt transactions and create major difficulties for both customers and employees. 

Test for Web Accessibility

About 1 in 6 people are living with one or more disabilities. In the US alone, this population as a whole has a collective purchasing power of $490 billion, making them a significant consumer group for retailers. Using accessibility testing, retailers can make huge strides in making their sites accessible to everyone regardless of ability and maximize their customer base.

To summarize 

With Black Friday fast approaching ( November 25th 😲), now is the time to plan and execute vital website and application test campaigns to enhance the stability, reliability, and user experience of your e-commerce platforms. 

• To achieve the best results, test with real mobile devices.
• Test the entire customer journey, especially the checkout process.
• Eliminate any bugs that can prevent a frictionless user experience.
• Verify every payment service functions as intended to prevent the loss of orders.
• Thoroughly test BOPIS and related services on both ends: the store and customers.
• Avoid slow-loading pages, crashes, and other disasters by using performance testing.
• Implement accessibility tests to make sure your website best serves all customers.

StarDust CTG, a leader in Testing and Quality Assurance (QA) for digital services, hunts down bugs and allowing its clients to reduce their business risks and maximize their user satisfaction. With QA Labs in North America and Europe, a global crowdtesting community, and a team of consultants, we enable our clients to overcome a variety of testing challenges by providing scalable and flexible testing services and solutions.

To optimize or accelerate your website or application testing process, or to learn more about our services, please do not hesitate to contact us.