What Is eCommerce testing?

eCommerce testing helps you evaluate the functionality and efficiency of your ecommerce website and applications. This type of website testing analyses your platforms from different aspects such as navigational design, overall functionality, specifications, available features as well as security. 

eCommerce testing can help you avoid major errors and ensure the delivery of a seamless shopping experience. While earlier forms of testing focused only on security, in the contemporary setting it is important that testing is holistic and scrutinizes each component for its Ease Of Use and Usability. 

By effectively testing your eCommerce websites, you can combat issues before they arise and understand how your website performs in the real world more deeply. 

Advantages of eCommerce testing:

Work on Your Online Shop Performance: 

Since eCommerce websites integrate multiple platforms and applications to make their stores run, an effective eCommerce Test can help you detect bugs in the system. It is important that your run a trial and test automation for your website once you’ve implemented new solutions, this can prevent buggy solutions from getting published and give you a better understanding of the changes. 

Guarantee website availability :

If your website is down not only does it keep you from accepting orders and making sales, but it drives your organic traffic away! An Infonetics Survey found that companies in United States lose up to 100 million per year to downtime. Testing your navigational flow as well as your hosting services can help you prevent unplanned downtimes. 

Ensure robust search functionality and fast loading speed: 

Some research suggest that consumers go directly to the search bar when visiting a website. This means that your eCommerce website should provide seamless searching through your product catalogue and if possible look books. Similarly, if your website loads slowly your customers are more likely to abandon it. 

Debug the Shopping Cart:

Problems with your shopping cart will inhibit your customers from placing orders even though they have already passed through browsing and selection phase. Hence, buggy shopping cart experiences can lead to more rejection at the doorstep. Comprehensive evaluations of your cart to checkout experience can help you identify if customers are able to use their discount codes or avail coupons. 

Security Is A Priority:

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When you conduct extensive audits of your ecommerce management platforms as well as its UI, you will be able to identify potential vulnerabilities that can be exploited by black hat hackers or fraudulent parties. Additionally, this layer of testing provides security on two ends, first it secures you from malicious activity, but it also secures your customers and ensures their transactions are safe!

eCommerce testing checklist:

To help you get started, we have prepared a checklist of components and features you should look out for: 

1. Hero Image‍

Hero Images are the large banners at the top of the first page of your website. This is the first image a consumer sees on your platform.
a) Does the image Auto Scroll? If yes, how often?

b) How quickly does the image load? Is it interactive?

2. Product Description/ Details Page
   
   After a consumer has found a product, they are looking for they are usually directed to the product description or details page. This page helps your target audience decide whether they will make the purchase or not. Hence, a few obvious mistakes to avoid are providing low quality images or badly written product detail. You can also look for:
   
   a) Use of colour to draw consumers towards specific elements
   b) completeness of information. Your pages should contain all the information the consumer is looking for including details like manufacturers, shipping details and ingredients etc. 

3. Shopping Cart
   

Once a consumer starts adding products to their cart, that means that your business is at the last step before onboarding. Hence, shopping carts are an important site for business and decision making both for you and your consumers. Buggy, slow or lengthy shopping cart experiences can drive consumers away from the doorstep and result in the loss of all the hard work that went into consumer acquisition and awareness. 

When testing your Shopping Cart, ensure that basic features like adding and removing items work seamless and visibly. Additionally, adding or removing different items from the cart should reflect seamlessly in the number of items in the cart as well as the total price. 

Building seamless and easy checkouts can be challenging, hence bSecure has worked tirelessly to figure a out a formula that doesn’t fail. Read more about our easy Checkout Process here or head on over here to test out our Demo.

4. Search Algorithms
   
   Effective Search Algorithms ensure that your customers find the product they need every time. Since your product pages can only present a limited number of products, search algorithms enable consumers to have more control! 

Your Searching features should allow consumers to  effectively filter data through categories like colour, size, price, availability, and ratings. Moreover, the number of results displayed per search page can needs to be optimized for the right balance between visibility and avoiding the paradox of choice.

5. SEO Related Features
   
   SEO can be a crucial source of improving your organic traffic. Optimizing how well your website and its various pages rank on search engine result pages can impact how many people see your website at all!
   SEO can involve working on meta-data, link texts, cookies, and meta descriptions. To understand SEO more deeply, read our blog on the subject here.
   
   
6. Final Checkout
   
   After your shopping cart, the final Checkout page is where businesses lose most of their consumers. Cart Abandonment at this stage can be the result of many issues such as non-availability of preferred payment option or a requirement to sign in before completing transaction.
   Your website’s navigational structure should account for such user behaviours and allow consumers to purchase products without the hassle of sign in by providing Guest Checkout.
   
   

bSecure can help you avoid abandonment at this stage and save you the time in testing your checkout funnel. Not only do we provide integrations with multiple payment gateways, but we also offer you detailed reports by Google Analytics to help you understand user behavior at the doorstep. Read more about what you can do with Data and bSecure on our blog.

Conclusion:

A comprehensive test of your ecommerce website can help you debug and prevent problems. It also ensures that your website continues to perform effectively as business proceeds. For a detailed audit of your website, you can also investigate: 

1. Compatibility: This analyses how well your websites works on different browsers. 
2. Social Media Integration: Does your social media presence flow into your website? 
3. Mobile Responsiveness: Most ecommerce orders now happen through mobiles. Make sure your website scales well to different screens and loads smoothly on mobile networks!

bSecure helps you stay on top of your testing by providing you with detailed reports by Google Analytics. Our plug-and-play check out solution is easy to integrate and provides you with the capability to analyse how your customers experience shopping cart experience in depth. Moreover, our checkout funnel is regularly tested and optimized for maximum Ease of Use and minimum friction. Become a part of our amazing roster of clients by signing up here!

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