To boost Black Friday sales, retailers must provide a pristine customer experience across their e-commerce ecosystem. To do this, it is critical to test applications and websites to find and eliminate any anomalies or bugs before they can taint the user experience and lead to lost sales.
While customers love to shop, they are no longer willing to support brands that offer a mediocre customer experience. To fully maximize online sales, it has become imperative to provide a flawless and seamless customer experience both online and offline.
Results from a recent PwC survey demonstrate just how important the consumer experience is. After just one negative interaction with a favorite brand, 32% of customers said they would be willing to switch allegiances. As a result, e-commerce strategies should include testing every part of your online customer experience. After all, e-commerce sales continue to grow annually.
It is well documented that consumers will pay more for a solid customer experience. Properly testing websites and applications before going live is the best way to avoid rolling the dice when it comes to the quality of your e-commerce platforms. Buggy sites and apps can easily result in backlash on social media and damage your brand's image.
Offering The more seamless a customer’s encounter with your brand, the higher the likelihood they’ll hand over their loyalty. And remember, customer loyalty is worth its weight in gold. People who consider themselves brand fans will often refer others and talk about their great experiences with your brand (both online and offline).
Testing can also increase your marketing ROI by helping you retain existing customers, which is less costly than attracting new ones. When your website or app function perfectly, you can expect those customers to stick around.
So, invest in your testing strategy to guarantee a great customer experience that facilitates the shopping experience and builds customer loyalty. To help your brand in this journey, here are a few recommendations to help you maximize your online sales.
1) Test the checkout funnel
Testing the checkout funnel and all of its functionalities is essential since shoppers will abandon online carts quickly. If your “add to cart” button doesn’t work or your checkout page loads slowly or doesn’t load at all, frustration will set in and your cart abandonment rate will increase.
A second common checkout miscue is when discount codes don’t work. While bugs are inevitable, testing is the best way to find and eliminate them.
2) Test the mobile-friendliness of your website
In a mobile-first world, your website must be mobile-friendly. Don’t just look to see if your user interface has an appealing aesthetic across different screen sizes. Instead, make sure your site loads quickly under normal conditions. Slow website speeds and mobile device fragmentation can rapidly lead to revenue loss impacting your bottom line.
Spend time looking for any bugs that mobile users could encounter. When changes or updates to the code are made, run regression testing to ensure they have resulted in any unintended consequences. It is also rather important to validate your bug-fixes. In the end, the goal is to ensure an interface that’s easy to use, bug-free, and super fast.
3) Test with the help of a QA partner
Your team might find it challenging to focus on testing when there’s so much more on the Black Friday preparation to-do list. In that case, contact a trusted partner in the industry. At StarDust, we partner with a variety of brands to test their websites or apps across 3,000+ real device (including smartphones, tablets, and desktops).
Customer Case Study: Havaianas x StarDust
In addition, our team of expert QA specialists can integrate into our clients team to add needed expertise to overcome particular automated testing, performance testing, accessibility testing, or other software testing challenges.
4) Test the performance of your website or application
Even the biggest brands in the world have seen their websites or applications crash during the weight of extreme workloads that often coincide with major shopping periods. Nonetheless, it is imperative to prevent this from happening.
Use load testing, stress testing, spike testing, and any other performance test to uncover bottlenecks or defects that negatively affect your website's or application's responsiveness, stability, scalability, availability, reliability and resource usage.
Do not hesitate to reach out to StarDust CTG Group to learn how our team of QA specialists can help your organization with its testing needs or challenges.
