Strategies You Can Use To Test an E-Commerce Website

In today’s world it is difficult that you will find anyone who has not shopped online. The retail and e-commerce industry is one among those businesses which thrive on the online customers. As compared to shopping in stores, online shopping turns out to have many advantages such as time saving, best price, convenience, and easily accessible to the products worldwide.

The success of any e-commerce website depends on the proper functioning of the following factors mentioned above followed by not having any bugs in it. And by doing this you are then giving the customers an opportunity experience the best shopping experience. There have been many cases of the e-commerce industry that have led to a failure, and these failures can be avoided by implementing the right testing techniques. Given below are the strategies that you can use in order to test an e-commerce website.

The Home Page

The homepage of every e-commerce website is quite busy all the time. This is a page that has a lot many things going on at the same time. And almost all of them have a best and attractive image on their website.

The following are some of the things that need to be tested when it comes to an e-commerce website and they are as follows:

• Can the content of the website be viewed?
• Could it be hovered on?
• Can it be clicked on?
• If yes is it taking you to the right page and deal?
• Is it taking you to auto scroll?
• If yes at what interval will the page be refreshed?
• Does it continue to render in the same way when it comes to different browsers and screen resolutions?

Search Algorithms

This is the most important part of testing when it comes to the success of the e-commerce website. The reason behind this is we cannot always place things what the user wishes to see in front of his eyes. Below are some of the testing methods which has to be deployed for seamless user search interface;

• The search results have to be relevant
• How many results can be displayed on a specific page
• The searches should be based on the product name, brand name, or something related to the category.
• When it comes to the multiple pages are there any options of navigating them.

Search generally happens on multiple platforms. So it is important that you take enough time to drill down multiple levels that has to be taken into consideration while validating the functionality.

Product page

Once you have the user who finds his or her product based on the needs and requirements be it on the search engine, or by clicking on the home page the user will be immediately taken to the product information page. So it is important that you test the following:

• Images of all the products on your website
• The pricing details of the product
• The specifications
• The Reviews
• The checkout options
• The Delivery options
• The In stock and out of the stock options and more.

Shopping Cart

At this phase of customer cycle, user arrives to complete his purchase. So, the following are the things that have to be tested.

• Adding items to the cart and then continuing with it.
• In case the user adds the same item once again to the cart, then the item count in the shopping cart should be inserted.
• Taxes as per the location should be applied
• The user can add more items into the cart
• Update the contents added to the cart and the total number of the products purchased should be implemented
• Removing items from the cart
• Proceed to checkout
• Apply checks
• Do not make a checkout, close the window and come back later in order to see if the cart still reflects the products you are planning to purchase.

Payment Options

As this is the final stage, when it comes to the payment option the following are the things that have to be tested.

Checking out the different payment options

User signing up

If allowed to check out as a guest, just finish your purchase and give the users an option of registering at the end

Returning customers login to be checked

If the user has signed up for a longer period of time, then don’t forget to check if the session has timed out or not. Each and every website has different thresholds so for some it might be 10 minutes and for some 5 minutes.

Keeping all the above things in mind it is important that you test e-commerce sites and mobile application so that it would not make any compromise when it comes to the user experiences, mobile responsiveness, quick loading time, secure transactions and the last but not the least customer data security. A website should work not just on the browser but even on the mobile phones. It has to be responsive and very much secured. The data has to be optimized and the ETL processes should help in maintaining the Data ware house. E-commerce testing is a must to drive sales and maximize conversions for retail industry.

For more visit QualiTest Group.