Top Six eCommerce QA Tips: What to Undertake to Keep Ahead of the Competition
A lackluster marketing strategy, unoptimized SEO, irritating pop-ups, poor content ― these aspects are only a minor part of things that may trigger eCommerce solutions to flop.
The pressure is only increasing due to the influence of the pandemic, as more consumers begin to shift their preference to the comforts of home. From the outset of COVID-19, almost half of all customers in the UK acquired products online that previously they would have bought only from brick-and-mortar retailers.
With that in mind, software quality comes to the fore. Users now are seeking portable purchasing options with properly handled and high-performance applications at the helm. Otherwise, they won’t choose a company with a tarnished brand image. Unfortunately, within the eCommerce field, high-priced data breaches occur frequently due to the influx of pandemic-related web traffic.
Therefore, these top 6 essential QA tips can help avoid the risks of technical uncertainty, accelerate growth, and expand the end-user target base.
1 — Do not bail on cybersecurity testing
With the growing complexity of eCommerce apps, a notable increase in functionality, as well as their high level of personalization, it’s essential to have regular security monitoring, as it’s a must for enabling customer data confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Typically, the most common eCommerce vulnerabilities involve order and reward management, integration with the payment gateway, and CMS integration. Therefore, one should carefully watch for dozens of possible red flags ― ranging from drawbacks concerning transaction file management to shipping address manipulation. The eCommerce world still keeps in mind the event of a serious security breach that has compromised the data of millions of customers in turn provoking enormous unforeseen expenses.
To eliminate security mismanagement and the risk of sensitive data being exposed, it’s possible to reevaluate the approach used in spotting weaknesses by putting in place penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, continuous security monitoring, and finally automation of security checks.
2 — Give preference to Agile and DevOps testing
52 % of World Quality Report 2020–21 (WQR) interviewees mentioned that they shift QA activities left to fulfill verifications as early as possible. It’s no wonder as continuous testing brings significant value to businesses and unleashes the potential to obtain improved revenue.
Being both flexible and agile today means everything when it comes to stronger performance, informed decision-making, and faster delivery of new features with no major or critical issues. Within the culture of DevOps, QA and testing play an influential role when it comes to continuously improving products.
In the world of DevOps, QA and software engineers hold equally high responsibility for the overall impeccable software quality, stability, and performance, which only increases the chances of improving operational efficiency and delivering robust eCommerce products.
3 — Accelerate software rollout through test automation
Scaled-down software TCO, reduced time to market, increased ROI, improved QA transparency ― yes, these are only several benefits of introducing test automation. With each and every business striving to derive planned outcomes faster, reinforcing DevOps practice and CI/CD pipelines with automation may become a highly valuable decision.
With lean test automation, eCommerce business owners no longer need to spend precious time on hiring a fleet of QA engineers to tackle time-consuming manual tasks. Instead, they focus on what matters the most ― introducing innovation and upgrading software products.
Furthermore, to keep up with increased development pace and boost automation capabilities, one may advance the QA strategy by pitching on robotic process automation with AI at its core and engaging skilled software development engineers in test who leverage their coding skills to develop tests and tools, set up test environments, independently maintain applications, and many more.
4 — Provide space for innovation-driven QA
The founder of the World Economic Forum declared that currently ‘we’re at the start of a fourth industrial revolution’, which means that the way organizations perform will never be the same again. That’s especially true about the eCommerce industry. Just have a look: Amazon already utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) so that its customers can virtually try on various outfits.
Is there a way for companies to produce such technically complicated solutions with less financial and effort contribution? Definitely, the answer lies in applying technologies that enhance intelligent quality engineering potential.
Amongst them, artificial intelligence stands out clearly, as it enables better detection of issues, enhances overall accuracy plus test coverage, reduces operational costs, and even predicts customers’ needs. Almost 90% of WQR respondents stated that today, they either test using AI or test the AI itself. Why so? Despite the obvious benefits this smart technology provides, it also helps achieve continuous quality improvement.
5 — Focus on performance verifications
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, eCommerce organizations turned out to be the most resilient ones and managed to have soaring sales and increased revenue ― only a global giant such as Amazon was able to record profit growth increasing shares by 47% in 2020.
The period of sell-off during Black Friday and Cyber Monday is especially lucrative, as hundreds of thousands of customers rush to get goods with reduced prices. How does one help prepare a website for record-breaking traffic?
The answer to that question would be running performance tests, with a focus on client-side checks. According to the State of Online Retail Performance report, every 100-millisecond delay in page load time adversely affects conversion rates and cuts them by up to 7%. Therefore, thinking of performance QA in advance is a good policy to prevent income losses, deliver successful UX during high sales, and stay competitive in the global context.
6 — Introduce data migration testing
In the case of eCommerce re-platforming, thorough data migration testing plays a vital role. The amount of information to be transferred may be extreme ― from hundreds of products to thousands of orders. Therefore, ensuring full data shift, especially when it comes to unprocessed orders, is of high importance.
For some reason, the attention to this crucial step is often low. Leading to the typical eCommerce website migration issues, among which can be any of the following examples such as mistakes in product mapping or even the loss of customer order histories.
Brand perception is fragile, and even a slight change in the solution interface can have an adverse impact on the way people interact with a company, not to mention facing critical drawbacks that negatively influence user experience.
To sum it all up
The 2020 report published by the Lithuanian tech market player, in which the European and North American eCommerce business owners took part, indicates that the past year was successful for more than 60% of the interviewees.
Despite the figures being at record highs, a constantly increasing and shifting number of users will inevitably place a burden on many eCommerce-based organizations.
To withstand the pressure and beat the odds, companies may incorporate rigorous QA support into their development strategies. Once up and running, it irons out defects early in the SDLC, optimizes operational costs, contributes to boosting an overall quality level, and improves UX.
