As shelter in place orders extend, the digital transformation accelerates by necessity. Those who used to have to do all their banking transactions through the teller must now turn to online banking. Likewise, those who insisted on touching and feeling the products before purchasing have now no choice but to buy online, unless they want to risk infection. The effect of COVID-19 on the stock market and the economy is unprecedented. You may want to take note though, that Amazon, Walmart, and Costco stock prices have not suffered at all. These companies are booming along with other retailers that have a significant online presence. They’ve gotten legions of technical staff developing and maintaining their e-commerce engines, as any small glitch could mean huge monetary losses. To accelerate your e-commerce site as an instrument driving your business, it’s important to understand crucial issues before your releases.
Billing and payment: With COVID-19, greater reliance on electronic payment, and in particular, mobile payment will open up opportunities for those that do it right. Once a user has become accustomed to the convenience of the new payment options, they won’t go back to the ‘old way’. As such, not just functionality but security and performance must be tested across all payment gateways.
Usability: Any friction in completing their transaction could be lost revenue. UX designers are constantly observing user behavior and tweaking the user interface, while marketing may be conducting A/B tests to determine how they can positively impact the user experience. Constant change means continuously introducing possible defects and breaking something inadvertently. This effect can often compound and cascade to other functions as well.
Integration: From your inventory and supply chain management to your customer-facing e-commerce site, from its payment gateway integrations to your account reconciliation, all these components must be combined into a seamless system. Otherwise, not only your end-user will encounter friction in completing their transaction, but you’ll create unnecessary work for yourself in fulfilling their order.
Security: Unless you want to be in the news, you need to ensure that your data and software are secure. This includes ensuring that the standard OWASP vulnerabilities are always covered. You’ve also got to stay on top of breaches, holes, and any of the 3rd party updates that patch those holes. Maintain your awareness and resolve in the security aspect of your e-commerce website to stay out of the headlines.
Compatibility: Proliferation of devices is always a problem when it comes to mobile testing. Even though the industry has strived to solve this via responsive apps, problems still occur, even on common platforms. So, you need to test not only desktops but also the mobile devices that the majority of your customers use.
Business rules: While marketing is inserting promotions and discounts, inventory is constantly being updated, and delivery times are always in flux. Business rules need to be added or modified to prevent a promotion code from being used more than once by a customer, or by unqualified customers depending on qualification rules. This is only one of many other possible conflicts. Delivery times have to be conservative to properly set customer expectations, while returns have to be promptly processed under many different conditions. When these elements change either for certain customer classifications, products, or other transaction characteristics, many combinations must be tested to ensure functionality and integrity throughout each transaction and customer experience.
Data collection: While the e-commerce front end store is enticing customers to buy products, you also have to collect reliable data for follow up marketing and product reviews. Managing this aspect of your site requires clean meaningful data, detailed analysis, and accurate reporting to arrive at valuable insights. Ensuring reports are accurate and timely is often overlooked in the QA process, but it can be the most important aspect of your process in determining how you can better satisfy your customers.
XBOSoft Can Help
Software hitting on all cylinders will ensure better user experience and ultimately drive sales. Meeting these challenges requires attention to detail, domain knowledge in e-commerce and user behavior, a passion for software testing, and a focus on quality. Our solution; effective e-commerce software testing. For many companies, the demand for increased sales and getting to market quickly trumps the need for thorough testing of e-commerce systems. This can lead to e-commerce sites or updates being released before they’re ready. “Ready” or not could mean something small like an unscaled product image, or something bigger like a security hole where a customer can use another’s account and have the product delivered to them, or a performance glitch that takes down your database. This often results in news coverage that you don’t want. E-commerce software testing from XBOSoft gets you access to our experts who have e-commerce software testing experience combined with retail domain knowledge to quickly identify the problems and issues in your e-commerce store, and suggest critical improvements to keep customers coming back.
Download this white paper on Retail and Ecommerce: Digital Transformation and What It Means For Software QA to learn how to manage these complex issues.
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