How To Optimize Your E-commerce Application for This Holiday Season? Performance Testing Can Help!
In the last few years, online shopping has turned out to be an essential feature of the global retail framework. With the substantial growth in internet penetration and digital transformation in the retail landscape, this rise in online shopping will only get steeper with time.
In the year 2020, 77.2 percent of the US population bought their goods online. However, this share is projected to rise to 82.2 percent by 2024.
Such an acute boost in the e-commerce industry is not just limited to consumers in the US. There is a similar trend across the globe, which is also conspicuous from the sales numbers. In 2020, the worldwide E-commerce sales were reported as 4.28 trillion US dollars, and the revenue projection for 2022 is estimated to be around 5.4 trillion US dollars.
Ecommerce application crashes are a major concern!
Owing to the continuous digitalization of modern life and the luxury that comes with it today, consumers prefer e-commerce for their year-round shopping needs, including those in the peak holiday season. Therefore, businesses must be aware that if their e-commerce application causes even the slightest inconvenience to their consumers, it must be taken care of without delay.
Moreover, with the holiday season approaching, besides the usual application-related issues, e-commerce businesses are also concerned about frequent application crashes.
There are numerous examples of how an e-commerce application or website crash would strip the business of its credibility as well as its ability to earn potential revenue during the period. Two of the most popular ones include the 2013 Amazon’s 30-min website crash, where it lost $66,240 per minute and the Costco website crash, where the company lost around $11 million.
How can performance testing help?
E-commerce applications have multiple functionalities, be it related to payments, search options, shopping cart, or product details. Conducting a thorough performance test on each of these functionalities will evaluate if the application can sustain a sudden traffic spike. Once the QA testers identify performance-related issues, they can successfully tackle all of them, thereby ensuring the smooth functioning of the e-commerce application.
Here are a few of the essential factors that businesses can consider with respect to their e-commerce applications:
Load testing critical user paths
Every e-commerce application and website has several critical user-flows that must function properly to maintain its smooth user navigation. These user paths include login page, registration page, product page, checkout page, shopping cart, etc.
Before making the application live, all of these paths need to be verified and validated. However, keeping in mind the probability of a sudden increase in user traffic, QA testers also need to test the performance of these paths under various load conditions.
Only an elaborate application performance testing process would help e-commerce businesses single out the potential areas that can crash during the peak season.
Opting for cloud-based performance testing
Cloud computing has transformed the technical architecture of e-commerce applications, thereby enabling businesses to provide high scalability and swift simulation of customers on the e-commerce application without any additional hardware. Apart from the smooth operability, adopting cloud technology also facilitates cost-effective and hassle-free performance testing.
Most e-commerce businesses get apprehensive about conducting performance testing in a traditional setup due to its high cost and complicated testing environment. Additionally, running performance tests on geographically diverse locations can cause inconvenience to organizations.
In this regard, adopting cloud technology benefits businesses with affordable performance testing for multi-location functionalities within a simple setup.
Performance testing on mobile
In this mobile-first age, consumers will not take a business seriously if they are not mobile. However, merely having a mobile application does not guarantee that an e-commerce business will benefit from it. In fact, far from benefitting the company, a subpar mobile app that crashes every now and then will hamper its existing credibility.
So, for businesses, conducting performance testing is not just limited to website applications but extends to their mobile applications as well. Performance testing the application on mobile devices ensures that it performs smoothly under all conditions and does not crash during peak hours.
However, mobile app performance testing is quite different from testing web apps. Be it using testing tools or setting up testbeds, businesses need to follow a completely different approach for mobile app performance testing.
Load testing the payment systems
For the success of e-commerce businesses, a smooth payment gateway is indispensable. All the efforts and money put into designing and developing an e-commerce application will prove to be futile if potential customers exit the payments page due to the payment gateway page being non-responsive during a peak traffic situation.
Moreover, holiday season traffic has the potential to generate more revenue. So, the need to have a robust payment gateway during this period is more than ever.
A payment gateway can either be hosted or shared. In each case, businesses need to load tests by simulating a high frequency of simultaneous payment transactions. This will ensure that a payment gateway is able to function seamlessly even during the peak traffic of the holiday season.
Key Takeaways
Performance testing helps businesses to identify several shortcomings in an e-commerce application. However, the process here demands a high degree of technical expertise and professional experience with software testing frameworks and performance testing tools.
Most e-commerce companies do not possess the skills and proficiency required in conducting performance tests. Therefore, it is recommended to seek the help of technology assurance and quality engineering experts who are adept with all the performance testing and performance engineering methods.
