14 Aug 2017

Is your E-Commerce Application Ready for the upcoming Holiday Season?

• Black Friday Testing
  
• eCommerce Testing
  

Summer seems to be ending very quickly and the holidays are fast approaching. Is your website/application up and running as planned? Even if it is, it needs to be additionally prepped for the fall and winter holiday shopping season. Sometimes, the application is not able to withstand the sudden influx of users and before you know it, either the website servers are down, or the payment gateway crashes. This negligence can end up having an adverse impact on the brand. Executing a great amount of testing can help you cover different conditions under a uniform environment. Let us talk about 3 most effective testing techniques that help your e-commerce company to deal with adverse situations on those big days:

1. Perfecting the Performance: The significance of performance testing cannot be stressed upon enough. It is important that the application is able to handle the website traffic for the holiday season sale and to be able to execute multiple transactions consecutively. This is where most applications, regardless of all the forecasts and calculations, tend to fall short. An experienced testing company would be able to use the most appropriate tool required to deliver the basic metrics of your application.

If we check past few year’s statistics, regardless of continuous checks, leading brands like Macy’s, Target, and Tesco encountered website crash after Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic spike. Check out the news here:

a) http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/macy-s-website-crashes-after-black-friday-traffic-spike-n688401

b) https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/target-com-latest-to-crash-from-increased-online-traffic/

c) http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/black-friday-tesco-deals-website-crash-yet-another-blunder-by-ailing-supermarket-monster-1477090

2. Giving Prominence to Usability Testing: Considering that e-commerce websites hold plenty of dynamic content, usability testing helps testers detect issues faced by potential users. The testing is performed under given scenarios that represent realistic conditions. A/B testing or split testing comes under this category and is possibly the most effective method to provide a choice of desired user experience to your customers.

3. Getting the Spotlight on Security: Security is not an option. In fact, it is an important aspect that can either make or break your e-commerce company. Ensuring that your website is secure is possibly the most important advice here. While other issues can be ignored, overlooked, or elapsed time but security issues can have a huge impact on your business. The amount of sensitive information, an e-commerce application has increased the risk of it getting hacked. To deal with such instances, prior security measures should be taken in the form of extensive security testing.

Conclusion

Since your website/application is the gateway to your business, you should embrace the right testing strategy that helps you deliver the right buying experience to your customers and helps you gain more and more customers. Once you are ready with planning an effective testing strategy, all you need to do is to assign the right time and resources.

TestingXperts is the leading provider of testing solutions globally. We cater to customers across various industry domains, through effective testing solutions. We have successfully performed usability testing for our numerous clients. Get in touch with us if you are looking to test usability aspects of your business applications.