E-commerce businesses have recently had door-busting sales that broke every single existing record. According to adobe analytics, the total revenue from online sale alone is a whopping 100 billion dollars in the US this year – a 5.5% increase from last year’s sales figure.
Most e-commerce companies start planning for the holiday rush as early as June aiming to crush the sales season.
However, businesses curate their marketing strategies with the sole intention of customer acquisition and maximising their revenue from holiday sales that they most often overlook the customer retention part.
Customer experience
Automation of end-to-end testing in e-commerce aids businesses in managing the sudden surge in the influx of customers to the website as well as creating a memorable online customer purchase experience that builds brand loyalty.
Holiday sales or end of season sales prep does not stop with the obvious marketing, sales and fulfilment planning.
Although these are very crucial stages while preparing for the sales season, testing the ability of your site to handle massive order volumes and seamlessly perform across different platforms such as mobile, tablets and such is equally important
Testing an e-commerce site could be broadly divided into the below categories:
Performance testing
2 seconds is the threshold for e-commerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.” Maile Ohye, from Google
For an e-commerce site predictably, website load time is one of the defining factors in your customer conversion funnel. More so during high traffic periods, when you have to ensure efficient data transfer rate, website loading speed and tolerance of unusual large data volume, changes at a programming level have to be incorporated at a blitzkrieg pace.
What if the incorporated code accidentally destabilizes some of the older functions? Nightmare!
Functional testing
Flash sales involve discounts, coupon codes, gift cards and other creative promotions that are meant to boost your sales. However, your customers would be unforgiving if the promos are rigged causing more harm to your brand reputation. Or worse, consider a customer who wades through a sea of other websites to land on your page, gets hooked to a product discount and finally places an order, just to find his transaction fail.
Security testing
Given that the transactions through digital payment alone amount to a total of US$3,265,209, a functional testing of the transaction gateway will not suffice. It should be ensured by equally rigorous integration and security testing. Is your payment gateway easily integrable with credit cards as well as a debit transaction? Does it have the ability to withstand large payments? Is your network protected from spoofing? Are SSL certificates implemented at various points of the transactions?
With automated testing, the chaos and panic that accompanies any new code modifications can be immediately put to rest. It also relieves the mundane process of manually testing each module in silos and then again when integrated.
Automated end-to-end testing is a one-stop solution to receive a holistic validation of an entire e-commerce site. Along with an agile and responsive framework, it ensures uniformity across segments, easy front-end back-end synchronisation and quick regression tests that keep the older functions in check while you focus on implementing new features.
40% of an e-commerce store’s revenue is created by its repeat customers. Creating an amazing buying experience is what helps in transforming a transactional sell into a relational one. End to end automation testing remains to be a key for e-commerce sites to unlock this door of seamless customer shopping experience.
