Software testing for ecommerce site is as crucial as it gets. Because when you have an ecommerce website, you can’t afford to risk your reputation, engage in fraud or fail to deliver answers to your clients and customers when they ask some questions. You will need to establish a process that helps you in testing software application and ensure that your ecommerce site is capable of supporting the variety.
If you’re wondering how software testing for ecommerce works and looking to find answers to your questions regarding software testing, this is the right place. Software testing is a series of activities executed by experts (testers) on the product which covers both design and functionality to ensure that everything is working as intended. Based on specific processes and they follow, they test the functionalities of a complex application like an ecommerce website from different aspects – be it security or performance.
Software testing is an important aspect of software development. And as e-commerce businesses have evolved into corporate giants, the complexity and scale of their websites have also increased significantly.
If you’re an owner or manager of an e-commerce website – you should definitely care about software testing for ecommerce website. Regardless of the volume and location of your sales, always remember that any error could lead to a loss of current and potential customers. Each pageview is a foundation stone of your successful future.
What is eCommerce testing? Why is it important?
eCommerce testing can be defined as the process of testing various eCommerce website elements such as design, specifications, functionalities, pages, and features to check their sanity and ensure they’re not harming the performance of the site in any manner possible.
When done correctly and continuously, testing can not only improve your site visitors’ overall experience but significantly increase conversions as well. Mentioned below are some reasons explaining the importance of testing and optimization.
1. Improve user engagement
As stated above, testing helps check the hygiene of a page element. It tells us which page element or process affects a user’s onsite journey and helps us rectify the issues faster. The better the user experience, the more shall be the onsite engagement.
2. Generate marketing strategies
Testing and optimization allow you to make effective plans for your website. By reiterating your site’s problematic areas, you can engage more people and also increase their stay.
3. Reduce risks
Many times, making major and considerable changes to your site can cause notable strategic changes or even trigger significant losses. However, testing these changes in a planned manner can help eliminate the chances of these uncertain losses.
4. Increase conversion rates
Since you’re testing almost every aspect of your website and ensuring a smooth visitor experience through site optimization, your conversion rate is bound to increase.
5. Better understanding of visitor behavior
It’s often difficult to map your website visitors’ needs and preferences and optimize your site accordingly. But with testing, everything is possible. It’s one of the best and quickest ways to confirm what your visitors like.
What are some key issues related to eCommerce testing?
The underlying principle behind a good user experience (UX) is to make life easy for your visitors. Every task on your website should be intuitive. You want people to be able to navigate around your website or application with minimum fuss.
While these principles are straightforward, it’s their implementation where things get tricky. A lot of factors play into the user experience. Think of all the stages of a user’s journey and test them from the first click on a product to the shopping cart.
For example, through form analysis, you can track how people are interacting with various input fields. This information provides you with insights on where users are experiencing problems. You can use this data to develop a hypothesis and run a test to check whether your assumptions or assertions are correct.
1. Testing for bugs
Regardless of how well you develop your website, there shall always remain some bugs in your wireframe that may disrupt your site’s functionality or hinder the visitor’s journey. While developers once couldn’t do anything about these bugs, today, they can use testing to fix these issues and create seamless UI/UX designs.
Some of the most common bugs that you may find on your eCommerce website are as follows:
- Browser compatibility problems
- Broken links
- Inconsistencies in the catalog
- Shopping cart issues
- Checkout bugs
According to a study by QualiTest, most of the bugs that sites encounter are of medium severity. These do not impair the usability of the site. However, they do have the potential to impact the eCommerce conversion rate and overall business sales.
When managing an eCommerce store, it’s essential to put a system to identify bugs and eliminate them as soon as possible. It is especially important to have a quality assurance strategy in place when undertaking any sustained eCommerce testing.
2. Testing conversion rates
Your eCommerce conversion rate ultimately defines the success of your business. The higher the conversion rate, the higher shall be your business’ revenue. Understandably, given the importance of sales to any business, conversion rates focus on extensive eCommerce testing.
There are various stages to any conversion rate optimization test. The first stage is to set objectives and determine the most suitable type of test. Your choice must always be based on data, rather than pure intuitions. For example, if you decide to review your brand’s purchase cycle, ensure to data back all your decisions.
The next step is to test and gather available data and form a hypothesis. Tools like heatmaps, form analytics, scrollmaps, session recordings etc. can help analyze user behavior and provide useful information. Always gather enough information before running a test to ensure you’re moving in the right direction.
Standard statistical testing methods include A/B testing, split testing, and multivariate testing. You can use this A/B duration calculator to determine how long a test on your site will take.
Which site areas and elements should you test?
The ultimate goal of every test is to increase the conversions and revenue of your eCommerce business. You want to focus on running conversion optimization tests that provide the maximum return on investment. There are certain areas of your eCommerce website that you will naturally target to ensure a seamless visitor experience. Some of these are as follows:
1. Search and navigation
Site search and navigation are two of your website’s primary elements extensively used by your visitors to explore your website or mobile app. Ensuring they’re free of bugs and promise a frictionless experience must always be your top priority.
Best Choice Products, an eCommerce website selling garden, music, children, and fitness products, illustrates the importance of testing your navigation. As part of a round of eCommerce A/B testing, they ran a test on their mobile navigation and search bar. They hypothesised that by improving the visibility of the search bar on the header will improve user penetration into the website. The control and variation version of the test are as follows
Running the test for about 7 days, the execs at Best Choice Products witnessed that visitors were engaging more with the search functionality. A minor change on the header resulted in a 0.1% increase in site revenue. It may not have been a game changer, but it did help the company get more revenue than before.
2. Homepage design and features
The homepage is one of the most important pages of any website, for it represents the face of your brand. Even if it’s not your primary landing page, it still deserves to be one of the most intricately designed pages. You need to offer great user experience and ensure that everything works as it should.
There are numerous forms of eCommerce testing you can run on your homepage. One thing which is becoming increasingly accessible to sites across content management systems is website personalization. The Very Group’s website is a perfect example to quote here.
Based on a visitor’s geographic and demographic information, the site shows personalized homepages to each of its visitors. For instance, and as visible in the image below, if a customer lands on Very’s homepage during the winters, it displays a collection accordingly. Meanwhile, if the customer belongs to a country experiencing summers, the website personalizes user experience accordingly.
Personalized homepage and landing pages open new and exciting avenues for eCommerce testing.
3. Product pages
A visitor to your eCommerce store will either land directly on a product page or eventually navigate to one. Once there, you want them to purchase the product. Ask yourself, what does your potential client need to know about this product or service to get them to my payment gateway? What can I do to increase the likelihood of a person adding a product to the shopping basket?
Unfortunately, there is no one answer to these questions.
You will need to run tests to see what changes you make to the product details page that get your business the best results. For example, you can test if adding elements that emphasize on scarcity or urgency would boost sales.
Other elements on a product page you can test include your CTA, social proof, images, videos, recommended products, featured products, etc. Changes to any of these elements have the potential to increase conversion rates to the shopping cart and onto your payment gateway.
4. Shopping cart and checkout process
It is a well-known fact that cart abandonment rates are high. According to BigCommerce, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.23%. This is the number of people who put a product into their cart and leave without making a purchase.
There is a large body of information on why people abandon a shopping cart during an online purchase. The graph below illustrates some common findings.
Improving your checkout and payment system revolves around addressing some or all of these issues. The eCommerce website Zalora offers an insight into how eCommerce testing on checkout pages can improve conversion rates.
They ran an A/B test on their checkout page, testing how they could emphasize the free returns policy for some products. The control is on the left, and the variant is on the right.
The variant outperformed the control by 12%. This small change to the design of the checkout page caused an uplift in the checkout rate.
There are, of course, other elements to test. Adding more credit card payment options, security logos, social proof, and more can all lift your conversion rate. The important thing is to instill a culture of testing into your company, and experiment to discover what works.
Optimizing your shopping cart experience for conversions is one of the quickest ways to increase sales. Running these tests is a lot easier than you might imagine. Try VWO now to see for yourself.
5. Site performance across devices
As mentioned earlier, people are accessing your website through an increasing range of devices. A study by Statcounter shows that 52.03% of the world population accesses the internet through mobile.[5] At a basic level, it’s essential to have responsive websites. This allows you to adapt your site to different devices and screen sizes.
However, even if your site is responsive, you can still encounter problems. Cross-browser compatibility issues are common. To further complicate matters, the OS a website is accessed on, the screen’s size, and the internet speed all impact user experience.
As you are no doubt aware, there is a clear correlation between the amount of time a page on your site takes to load and the likelihood of someone making a purchase. The graph below illustrates this point.
There is a high probability that your website’s page load time is optimized for desktop because for most sites it is. However, mobile load time can vary tremendously. You must implement technical solutions that address problems like this alongside optimizing your eCommerce website copy and design elements. Every step a user takes through your website is part of their user experience.
Top Features To Be Tested In An E-Commerce Application
One of the key reasons for eCommerce testing is to check the functionality and usability of the application, its user-friendliness, and to make your website/application bug-free.
To make the process smooth, here are some of the important features which need to be tested in an eCommerce website or application –
- Website Functionality For Different User Scenarios
An eCommerce website/application works differently for different user profiles such as customers (both authorized and unauthorized), sales representatives, and online shop managers. It is, therefore, important to make sure that your eCommerce website test cases cover the varied operations for all types of users such as filtering of items, adding/removing goods to the shopping cart, and so on.
- Compatibility With Web Browsers
One of the critical features to test in eCommerce applications is to check their compatibility with various types of web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Safari, etc. This is important to make sure that the customers are able to use your e-commerce website without experiencing any technical glitches.
- Application Workflow
To offer a hassle-free eCommerce experience to customers, it is pivotal to test the complete workflow of your eCommerce web/mobile application that consists of login and signup options, sorting feature, search functionality, add/remove functionality in the shopping cart, check-out process, payment gateway, and payment processing among others.
- Mobile Responsiveness
An increasing number of users are now using mobile devices, driving companies to reconsider their eCommerce testing strategy, and take a mobile-first approach in their eCommerce applications. The important aspect here is to test the responsive design of the application in mobile devices of different screen sizes.
- Social Media Integration
Irrespective of the type of eCommerce application or website, social media is one of the most important factors in defining its success. But to leverage it fully, you need to make sure that social media integration is completely aligned with website architecture and workflow, and your eCommerce website testing is an ideal way to test social media workflow and functionality.
- Security And Vulnerability Assessments
Without a doubt, security testing to check for security and vulnerability issues is one of the most important yardsticks to keep in mind during eCommerce testing. As eCommerce applications involve dealing with valuable information, including customers’ personal and banking data, assessing security issues is non-negotiable. Among the varied testing methods that can be used for this include SQL Injection and ethical hacks on the login.
- SEO-Related Aspects
One of the other important features in eCommerce testing is to check the overall performance of your website/application. There are several parameters that you need to conduct performance testing on, including data transfer rate, efficiency, webpage loading speed, uptime, database performance, website traffic load tolerance, and error messages.
Further, to win higher rankings in top search engines, it’s important to check whether various SEO strategy components such as the title tags, image alt tags, URL structure, meta descriptions, etc. are implemented accurately and correspond to the requirements.
Apart from this, other common features to test in eCommerce applications include website content, the format of webpage, cookies, social buttons, website accessibility, adding/deleting content, removing/adding links, making changes to shipping settings, and analytics.
Read to know more about the best e-commerce platforms where you can easily create and manage your own online store.
Whether you need the simplicity of a cloud solution or the control of hosting tests locally – we’ve got you covered.
Hybrid Cloud
Benefit from zero server maintenance, seamless collaboration and automatic deployment of your tests.
Offline
Save tests as local files directly on your machine with no cloud-footprint to get a complete offline experience. How it works
01 Create your tests wherever you want
Create reliable codeless tests powered by self-healing, adaptive wait and community addons, or extend even further with the OpenSDK. Utilize TestProject’s secured tests repository and benefit from zero server maintenance and automatic deployment. Utilize in-browser recorder to create powerful on-premise tests extended by the largest library of automation addons. Save tests locally on your machine for backup, version management and complete offline execution. Learn More
02 Deploy your tests like never before
Leave the heavy lifting of setup, maintenance and orchestration to TestProject and benefit from automatic test deployment, remote execution and seamless integrations with your favorite tools. Build custom CI/CD pipelines easily with an integrated CLI for local test execution and HTML report generation including screenshots. Download complete “Test Package” with all the required components to execute even in isolated environments. Learn More
03 Debug fast & release with confidence
Collaborate on your test execution results in one centralized dashboard. Get insights about release quality, step-by-step detailed report with screenshots and logs. Including live documentation and BDD-ready report. Benefit from detailed Selenium or BDD reports in HTML format. Created locally for every execution without any footprints on the cloud. Providing you with an ultimate offline debugging experience.
CONCLUSION
Software testing is an integral part of the software development process. An e-commerce website needs to be tested rigorously by a professional software tester to ensure that it is developed and delivered without flaws. The business of an e-commerce store depends on a seamless interaction between its staff, its customers and its products/services. Any disruption in this interaction can result in loss of customer confidence in the brand and eventually business loss for the company.
If you are into e-commerce business, software testing for your online shop is the top priority. An online store should be more than just a website; it should be able to complete the entire order processing journey. By implementing third party software testing for your e-commerce business and using e-commerce testing checklist, you can ensure that your site is prepared for potential problems from the day you launch it.