A Complete Guide to eCommerce Testing
How often do you test your e-Commerce website? Could you be missing the most vital steps in your e-commerce testing processes?
Testing an e-commerce website is crucial for ensuring that it is fully functional, secure, and provides a smooth user experience. Bad website user experience can lead to customer mistrust in your brand, negative reviews, wasted investment and security risks. Inadequate and improper eCommerce website testing can lead to lost sales.
Experts at Knack Systems advise e-commerce businesses to follow the following testing checklist to ensure your e-commerce website is fully functional, secure and profitable.
Test Across Multiple Devices and Browsers
Your customers are likely to access your site from a variety of devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. They might land on your website from multiple browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, etc. So it is important to conduct effective e-commerce testing across these devices and browsers.
Ensure your website is fully functional and provides a consistent user experience everywhere.
Test Registration and Login Process
Your users must be able to easily and securely create accounts and access the website's features. You’ll need to ascertain that the required fields are clearly labelled and your registration process is easy to follow.
To ensure these features run properly, test user registration, verify emails, test login, and forgot password functionality. Assign validation to verify if your users are entering the correct information. See if the verification link is included in the email and if that link leads to successful verification. Check if your website sends a password reset email when the user clicks on the forgot password link and that link leads to the reset form.
Test Payment Gateway
Security gaps can lead to data breaches, fraud, and other security issues. Ensure the payment gateway is secure and your website supports various payment methods like credit/debit cards, PayPal, Stripe, etc.
To provide a smooth transaction experience, test the payment process: checkout flow, payment confirmation, and order tracking.
Test Product Catalog
Your product catalog is the heart of your ecommerce website, and it's essential for you to ensure it's accurate and up-to-date.
Ensure all product information, including images, descriptions, and pricing, is accurate and consistent. Also check that your website can handle different product types (physical products, digital products, and subscriptions).
Test Search Algorithm
If your online searchers can’t find you, they won’t buy from you. So how do you ensure what your users want to see on their screens?
Test for:
- Keywords (name of the product, brand, or category)
- Relevancy
- Competitive products and their brand, price and reviews/ratings, etc.
- The number of results to be displayed per page
- Interlinking between pages
- Search engine compatibility
Test Shopping Cart
Abandoned carts can be unfortunate as they happen around the final stage of the buying journey.
When testing the shopping cart, test whether processes like adding products to the cart and carrying on with shopping are running smoothly. Every time a buyer adds the same item to the cart, the item count should increase in the shopping cart. The items and their totals must also show in the cart. Your e-commerce site should allow buyers to add or delete products even after placing products in the cart.
Test Checkout Process
Your checkout process must be user-friendly and easy to navigate. It should support all necessary features such as shipping options, taxes, discounts, and promo codes.
Test the checkout process thoroughly to identify any potential issues, including errors, bugs, or glitches, that may lead to cart abandonment.
Test Website's Performance
Your customers expect fast-loading pages and quick checkout processes. If your website takes too long to load or the checkout process is slow, they are likely to abandon their cart and look for alternatives. Therefore, it is essential to test your website's performance and ensure it meets your customer’s expectations.
Tools like Google's PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix can analyze your website and provide recommendations on how to improve its performance. You can also conduct load testing to check how your website handles a large number of users.
Test Website's Security
Your customers trust your website with their sensitive information, including their credit card details. Ensuring that this information is secure should be of utmost priority for you.
Your security testing must involve testing your website for vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting.
You can also conduct penetration testing to simulate an attack on your website and identify any security weaknesses. Tools like SSL Labs test your website's SSL certificate and ensure it is valid and secure.
Test Website's Usability
Your customers should be able to navigate your website easily and find what they are looking for quickly. Invite real users to identify any usability issues in your website.
Tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg can analyze how your users interact with your website and identify areas for improvement.
To conclude, following these best practices will help you identify and fix any potential issues that may lead to cart abandonment, negative reviews, and customer mistrust in your brand. A well-tested e-commerce website will help you achieve success and ensure a positive user experience.
