8 important things to keep in mind while testing an eCommerce website

Introduction

We are living in the digital era, where Omni channel retail and seamless shopping experience are a necessity from a customer’s perspective.

The retail industry in particular is accelerating towards integrating various sales channels in order to give the customers a communal view irrespective of where they shop.

According to Euromonitor international, eCommerce will be the largest retail channel in the world by 2021, accounting for 14% retail sales that year.

As the ecommerce world continues to dominate, business are determined to ensure their customers are satisfied with seamless shopping experience.

A customer’s first bad experience on your website can make them abandon your website forever.

To bring an unhappy customer back to your ecommerce website could be an uphill task. Thus, it is critical for the website to undergo rigorous ecommerce software testing services.

Challenges in Testing an eCommerce website

There are always challenges in software testing. As far as ecommerce websites are considered, there are certain challenges faced by software testers while testing the ecommerce application.

Instead of looking as a challenge, the software testers can take this as a perfect opportunity to get creative and innovate in testing the website.

The objective for the tester here is to ensure the reliability, quality and performance of the online website is spotless.

Generally, an ecommerce website undergoes various types of testing. I have listed here a few common types of testing involved in testing an ecommerce website.

• Browser compatibility Testing

1. Lack of proper support for earlier versions of browsers
2. Extensions specific for browsers
3. Main platforms such as Windows, Linux and more should be covered in browser testing

• Device compatibility testing
• Usability Testing
• Functional Testing
• Security Testing
• Performance Testing
• Load testing

Amongst these, Functional & Performance testing will be the top priority for the clients. Performance is key because beating the competition by few milliseconds of loading time will give the edge in this competitive space.

When it comes to performance testing, performance bottlenecks, load handling and scalability analysis are an essential part of the process.

Performance testing is one of the main priorities in ecommerce testing and the website performance depends on the following factors:

Throughput

• Request per second
  • Executions per minute
  • Transactions per second

Response time

• Page load
  • DNS look-up
  • Seconds per click

At the time of outlining the Functional testing strategy, one needs to be careful about few factors, other than the standard technical aspects that one knows.

For this, it is best to use the open source test automation tools to be able to minimize testing efforts with no need for additional funds.

I have listed here 8 important things to keep in mind while testing eCommerce website:

• The E-commerce websites are quite involved in the process, and hence it may not be a good strategy to try to automate every action of customers. It is best to automate only the most essential and often-repeated activities.
• As eCommerce sites need changes every day, it is best suited to use regression test daily to assess the effectiveness of such changes.

• While testing the site, protecting Automating Integration type of scenarios wherein complete user experience is mapped right from selecting the link to making payment through the gateway.
• Only test the stable applications, else even the small change will mandate doing the whole exercise again.

• For an e-Commerce site, the most important section is the home page that covers critical information and showcases multiple products that change every day. So, it makes sense to check every link in the cover page using HTTP status code, before going for the regression test.
• If test scrips are executed on different browsers at the same time, please make sure that any product change or change of information is shown in all browsers at once.

• Make sure that every product related details and pricing information gets checked while testing and nothing gets left to chance, else it will lead to significant loss to the client.
• Design the test script such that it covers most of the user scenarios. For example, there may be a case when due to either low charge or the network issues, a user gets stuck and is informed of the failed status of the transaction through email or SMS. So, your test must be able to validate even such types of extreme scenarios.

Conclusion

eCommerce testing requires cautious planning, careful execution and attention to detail.

This task may seem difficult but this is a crucial element that contributes to the success of the ecommerce website.

Now that we have listed some of the key factors to keep in mind while testing an ecommerce website, it should be easier for you during your next expedition in software testing.