eCommerce Testing: How to Test an E-Commerce Website

By : Thomas Hamilton Thomas Hamilton
Hours Updated

What is eCommerce Testing?

eCommerce testing is defined as testing of an eCommerce (online shopping) application. It helps in the prevention of errors and adds value to the product by ensuring conformity to client requirements.

The objective of testing is to ensure

  • Software reliability
  • Software quality
  • System Assurance
  • Optimum performance and capacity utilization

Setting up an E-commerce system is a complex process and subject to many market-specific variables. To maintain the integrity of the E Commerce system, testing becomes compulsory

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In this tutorial, you will learn,

How to Test an Ecommerce Applications

E-Commerce Domain Knowledge is important for testing.

Types of Testing for E-commerce System

A common type of testing included into e commerce system is

Sr.# Type of Testing Testing Process
1 Browser compatibility
  • Lack of support for early browsers
  • Browser specific extensions
  • Browser testing should cover the main platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac etc.)
2 Page display
  • Incorrect display of pages
  • Runtime error messages
  • Poor page download time
  • Dead hyperlink, plugin dependency, font sizing, etc.
3 Session Management
  • Session Expiration
  • Session storage
4 Usability
  • Non-intuitive design
  • Poor site navigation
  • Catalog navigation
  • Lack of help-support
5 Content Analysis
  • Misleading, offensive and litigious content
  • Royalty free images and copyright infringement
  • Personalization functionality
  • Availability 24/7
6 Availability
  • Denial of service attacks
  • Unacceptable levels of unavailability
7 Back-up and Recovery
  • Failure or fall over recovery
  • Backup failure
  • Fault tolerance
8 Transactions
  • Transaction Integrity
  • Throughput
  • Auditing
9 Shopping order processing and purchasing
  • Shopping cart functionality
  • Order processing
  • Payment processing
  • Order tracking
10 Internationalization
  • Language support
  • Language display
  • Cultural sensitivity
  • Regional Accounting
11 Operational business procedures
  • How well e-procedure copes
  • Observe for bottlenecks
12 System Integration
  • Data Interface format
  • Interface frequency and activation
  • Updates
  • Interface volume capacity
  • Integrated performance
13 Performance
  • Performance bottlenecks
  • Load handling
  • Scalability analysis
14 Login and Security
  • Login capability
  • Penetration and access control
  • Insecure information transmission
  • Web attacks
  • Computer viruses
  • Digital signatures

Performance testing- a top priority in E-commerce

Just delay about 250 milliseconds of a page load time, is what keeps your customer going to your competitor. Retail giant Walmart overhaul their site speed and noticed an increase of 2% in visitor’s conversion rate and revenue by 1%.

Performance of your site depends on these factors

  • Throughput
  • Request per second
  • Transactions per minute
  • Executions per click
  • Response Time
  • Duration of a task
  • Seconds per click
  • Page Load
  • DNS Lookup
  • Length of time between click and seeing page

Useful Tools for Mapping E-commerce Site

  • UsabilityHub: UsabilityHub’s user testing platform and research panel help you improve the UX of your apps and websites. Get feedback from real people.
  • HotJar: It shows the most clicked and unclicked zones of sites by visitors
  • FiveSecondTest: This tool ensures that your message is communicated as effectively as possible, in just five seconds it tells what a person recalls about your website design
  • Feng-GUI: It simulates the human vision during the first five seconds and predicts what a real human would most likely look at
  • Optimizely: It enables you to test track, clicks, conversions or anything else that matters to e-commerce business

Challenges of E-commerce Testing

  • Compliance with security guidelines to safeguard customer data and identity
  • Compliance with accessibility standards to support multi-lingual markets and business regions
  • End to end testing and test management for large e-commerce transformation programs
  • Scalability and reliability of applications

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