Why & How to Test Your Website and App for the Summer Sales!

Good luck is when opportunity meets preparation, while bad luck is when lack of preparation meets reality - Eliyahu Goldratt

With the summer sales period approaching quickly, many retailers have a great opportunity to boost sales by offering great deals to consumers. However, the ability to fully capitalize on this opportunity can easily come down to the performance and quality of e-commerce websites and apps.

Retail E-Commerce Sales

In 2017, France, for example, spent more than 8.9 billion euros during their 5 week summer sales period. In fact, 3 out of 4 people in France took advantage of the summer sales in 2017 spending an average of 177,24 euros. Important to note is the role of e-commerce, which made up almost 43% of the total sales during the this period in 2017. Equally important was the role of m-commerce, which like e-commerce continues to gain popularity year after year.

This is especially true considering that about 40% of all online sales were placed using mobiles and tablet devices on the opening day of the 2017 summer sales. This trend is supported by general retail data.

According to FEVAD, during the first trimester of 2018, e-commerce sales grew 13% compared to the first trimester of 2017, which too increased by 13.5% from the first trimester of 2016. Amongst this increase, m-commerce increased by 25% during the first trimester in 2018 compared to this same period in 2017. 

Case Study: Testing an E-Commerce App Across 8 Markets

Thus, the quality and performance of a retailer’s e-commerce and m-commerce platforms will play a vital role during this year’s summer sales.

Quality Assurance Testing in E-Commerce 

With the rise of e-commerce and m-commerce, quality assurance testing has become vital for any retailer with a website or app. Why? Simply put, the extra traffic that websites and apps will receive during the summer sales period or any busy shopping season can easily make these platforms extra vulnerable allowing bugs to hamper load speeds, the performance of important functions, and much more.

Whether it is slow loading pages, unresponsive promotional codes, or important features that do not work, all of these issues can cause thousands of would be customers to abandon an underperforming app or website. When this happens retailers lose millions in would-be sales, which is safe to say is bad for business.

Source: http://linkbun.ch/07aoz

How to Test E-Commerce Apps and Websites ?

Test Planning 

When planning any QA testing campaign, it is essential to focus on your needs and goals to ensure that the test put in place is able to meet them.

To get started, it is imperative to consider what needs to be tested: mobile apps and/or websites? Due to the importance of e-commerce and the rapid growth of m-commerce, testing mobile and tablet apps and websites makes a lot of sense.

Test Configurations  

It is also crucial to determine the testing devices or configurations that can best achieve the goals of the testing campaign. To do this, it is vital to choose testing configurations that reflect the devices and operating systems your end-users or customers actually use. This is a surefire way to make sure that your testing campaign is equipped to uncover bugs on the most commonly used devices.

 According to Statcounter, 98% of the mobiles and tablets in France run either iOS or Android OS.

Define the test strategy

Vital to the success of a testing campaign is the test strategy, which needs to align with the campaign’s goals. With a variety of needs that any website or app can have, there are a number of testing strategies and method that can be employed during a testing campaign.

An important need or goal for any website or app is ensure that it can handle the increase in traffic that will occur during any busy sales period. With load testing, it is possible to test the performance of an app or website while under the stress of an enormous amount of users. Load testing is helpful in providing developers with data that can let them understand how many users a site or app can handle before its performance and speed start to decline.

Functional testing is another test that could be used to assess the performance of important functions or features on a site. This could evaluate customers’ ability to add items to or remove them from their basket, use search functions to locate specific products, checkout using different payment methods, verify that promotional codes function as intended, and much more.

Load and functional testing are important as they can be used to uncover a variety of bugs that have great potential to disrupt online shopping and lead to missed sales.

Besides these tests, another important type of test is User Experience (UX) testing. UX testing is used to assess the feel and ergonomics of a site or app that can either make shopping a more pleasant experience or stressful one. UX testing can uncover both bugs and web or app design flaws that frustrate users and lead to cart abandonment.

Environmental testing is great for measuring the performance of an app or website under various, real-world conditions. During a busy retail period, shoppers will use their mobile devices to shop online at home, at work, and out in public where network conditions can vary greatly.

Also, research conducted by the Mobile Marketing Association France showed 70% of French shoppers, much like American and European shoppers, use their smartphones while shopping in stores to find product reviews, promotional offers, compare prices, and more.

As a result, testing the way the app or website holds up under ideal and less than ideal networks conditions is important for finding bugs that can hinder the overall shopping experience both in the store and online.

As minor updates will be made to websites and apps in preparation of the summer soldes that present promotional offers. Since any edits to a website’s or app’s code can result in unexpected bugs in other parts of the site or app, regression testing is great for ensuring that new code changes do affect other parts of the website or app.

Conclusion

There is nothing more expensive than a missed opportunity - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

With a significant proportion of this years summer sales set to be placed online, it is more important than ever to ensure the quality and performance of retails websites and apps.

With testing labs in both Canada and France and a library of 3,000 testing configurations, StarDust has the expertise and resources necessary to meet your testing needs.

To learn more about the challenges of testing e-commerce sites, please check out our white paper below.