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Need Of Efficient E-Commerce App Testing In Corona Times

Need Of Efficient E-Commerce App Testing In Corona Times

Benefits of e-commerce app testing

The coronavirus imposed lockdown and the unstable global economical and commercial situation has seen a change in the mindset of consumers. No longer are they opting to visit malls and stores for their everyday purchases. Instead business is booming online. E-commerce or online sales are scrambling to brace the impact of this global pandemic by taking the help of e-commerce app testing services.

Statistically, global online sales or e-commerce has seen a sudden spike. In the US alone, June online sales grew by around 76%. Notably, the sales of specific products like toilet paper, sanitizers, antiseptic liquids, surface cleaners, medicines, groceries etc., saw some of the highest increase in sales during the COVID-19 pandemic. Across the world, e-commerce companies are playing a key role in ensuring people stay safe within their homes yet their daily needs get catered to.

Another positive side of this e-commerce boom is the preservation of jobs during the ongoing period of health and economic crisis. They are even creating new job opportunities in these trying times. The increase in popularity of e-commerce or online shopping is evident from the current online search patterns. With almost all countries worldwide keen on preventing the spread of the infection by encouraging social distancing and limiting physical contact between individuals, the digital economy is fast becoming the mainstay of many businesses and households alike.

Drawbacks to COVID-19 impact on e-commerce

But with this sudden spike, two conditions have also developed. They are:

  • Online businesses were not prepared to take on this sudden spike in popularity and usage and
  • Hackers are having a field day with all the confidential data currently available online.

In the first instance, the internet or World Wide Web played spoilsport as it did not have the required bandwidth to handle such a huge influx of consumers. The need for the internet heightened considerably with people being forced to stay back at home and work from home. Additionally, with people going online to cater to their daily needs, the internet was ill-prepared for such a huge onslaught of usage.

For the hackers, the sudden spike in e-commerce sales proved to be a goldmine that demanded to be explored. The e-commerce websites were ill-equipped to prevent a breach of data in some instances. Very recently an e-learning app was forced to take extreme measures as their database got hacked and valuable customer data stolen.

Thus to prevent such a security threat from materializing, e-commerce apps have been resorting to e-commerce app testing services. Thus these services too witnessed a spike. But to understand the COVID-19 implications of an e-commerce app, it is important to understand the different e-commerce apps present.

Types of e-commerce apps

Most e-commerce apps can be divided into 5 different categories. They include:

1. B2C or business 2 customer e-commerce: The main focus of these apps is directly on the end customers. They cater to these consumers by maintaining a virtual store and delivering the ordered products directly to the customer after selection and payment. Some common B2C apps are Amazon, Uber, and LinkedIn etc.

2. B2B or business 2 business e-commerce: Herein goods are provided to another business using the online platform. This category is not as popular as the B2C customer e-commerce category.

3. C2C or customer to customer e-commerce: While this is a relatively old concept, it is only now that it is fast catching up. Herein, individuals sell their products directly to customers using the online platform.

4. C2B or customer to business e-commerce: This type of business is common among freelancers, web designers, artists etc. These people sell products and services directly to big companies.

5. C2A or customer to administration e-commerce: The sales herein happen from consumer to any public administration.

6. C2C or customer to customer e-commerce: Herein trading happens between consumers using a money exchange medium like PayPal, Gpay etc.

All e-commerce apps fall under one of the above categories. The selection of the e-commerce app thus depends on the type of e-commerce business the owner wants to cater to.

Criticality of testing e-commerce apps

E-commerce today deals with a lot of different segments like finance, auction, marketing, manufacturing, wholesale and retail etc. The past few months have seen a huge spike in its popularity but e-commerce was set to show a predicted growth even before that. Thus to absorb this spike, websites and mobile apps need to be tested to reduce chances of failures. Some important reasons for testing e-commerce apps include:

  • App usability,
  • Interface user-friendliness,
  • Errors and mistakes etc.

There is also a mandatory need to comply with QA standards set by statutory bodies. These compliances enable an e-commerce app to show commitment, maintain product quality and ensure a superlative experience. Some of the important things that e-commerce app testing services offer to ensure security and quality of e-commerce apps and services are:

  • Functionality of the app: There are 4 important elements associated with an e-commerce app. They are:
  1. Main pages that include the Home Page, the Product Page, the Add to Cart and Checkout pages, the Special Offers Page etc.,
  2. Category or product type pages,
  3. Product descriptions and
  4. The shopping cart.

Initiating functional testing on the app or the e-commerce website enables developers to understand if the app is functioning properly and in an error-free manner.

  • Application workflow testing: To understand if the complete workflow of the e-commerce app is working properly, the following features also need to be tested. They include:
  1. Signup and login options,
  2. Search,
  3. Product review feature,
  4. Application of filters for choosing specific products,
  5. Sorting feature,
  6. The add or remove functionality of the shopping cart,
  7. Checking out process,
  8. Payment options,
  9. Generation of order no and invoice etc.
  • Payment gateway functionality testing: This is another important aspect of the e-commerce app that needs testing. This functionality testing should be carried out several times to ensure that:
  1. The product details including its price, tax, shipping charges, discounts are properly added so that the customer can pay the correct price,
  2. Payment processing can be done smoothly and in a hassle-free manner,
  3. Invoice generation is properly done and the same is sent via emails,
  4. Refund processes including refund receipts and emails for the same are working properly.
  • Security and cyber vulnerability testing: E-commerce apps are vulnerable to cyber attacks as they hold valuable customer banking and payment data. Thus security testing of the app forms a criticality that no one can afford to ignore. Testing methods generally used include ethical hacks, SQL injections etc. The pages that need to be tested for security and cyber threat vulnerability are registration and login, payment options and gateways etc.
  • Web browser compatibility: Many different users make use of search engines that are different from Google. They include Firefox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer etc. Thus e-commerce app testing services need to account for testing the functionality of the e-commerce apps so that all users enjoy a good experience irrespective of the browser used.
  • Mobile responsiveness testing: Today smartphones are fast overtaking desktops and laptops in popularity. Thus all apps need to be tested for mobile optimization. Most companies take a mobile-first approach to ensure e-commerce app success. Thus the app responsiveness vis-à-vis the different screen sizes needs to be tested for a good mobile experience.
  • Performance testing: This needs to be done to check if important parameters related to the website and its pages are working properly. These parameters include:
  1. Speed of webpage loading,
  2. Data transfer rate,
  3. Efficiency and uptime,
  4. Traffic load tolerance,
  5. Database performance,
  6. Throughput and
  7. Error or failure messages etc.

Also Read: Top 6 Trends in Mobile App Testing Services

Implementing SEO techniques imparts higher visibility to the e-commerce app and subsequently, this leads to better conversions and leads. Thus such SEO strategies like Meta tags, Meta descriptions, title tags, image alt tags, URL structure etc. also need to be tested for their proper implementation.

  • Social media integration: Social media has contributed hugely to the success of e-commerce apps. Thus the developer needs to ensure that the website architecture, workflow etc., is aligned with social media integration. Thus integration testing enables e-commerce app testing services providers to understand if APIs related to the same are working properly.

Thus the testing types that need to be applied to an e-commerce app to check and ensure its functionality and utility are:

  1. Functional testing,
  2. Performance testing,
  3. Usability testing,
  4. App testing,
  5. Database testing,
  6. A/B testing
  7. Security testing

There is no doubt that e-commerce app testing contributes hugely to its success. It ensures the reduction of such errors and failures that have the potency to crop up when it is being used by consumers.

Benefits of e-commerce app testing

There are several key advantages to enabling the testing of the e-commerce app like:

  • Improvement in the conversion rates leading to the strengthening of  business,
  • Increase in the release of updated versions so that the app can be kept upgraded to reflect the current user buying habits,
  • Facilitation of cost-cutting by:
  1. Improving the quality of the e-commerce app,
  2. Testing before launch so that errors and failures, if any, can be detected and
  3. Huge reduction in unsatisfied customers etc.

Retail is a highly evolving, volatile and dynamic industry. Thus it is recommended that e-commerce apps be tested before their launch. This ensures app success and enables the website owner to capitalize on the growing need for online retail. 

 

Effective Mobile App Testing Techniques

Effective Mobile App Testing Techniques

It’s smart, it’s trending and it’s a disruptor. The smartphone industry is continuously evolving by the day and these devices have set new standards for communication, for consumers, and for business worldwide. But what good is a smartphone without an application? Simply a heart without blood.

The market being flooded by a plethora of mobile applications, the question that rises is what drives a mobile app’s persuasiveness? What is the primary concern of App Testing Services companies and what could be some effective methods to keep a check on its functionality, quality and hygiene. Let us understand why mobile app testing is important and discuss some ways to make these app testing techniques more effective. These include:

  • Establishes a given brand

  • Builds loyal customer base

  • Increases ROI

  • Helps improving UI of the app

  • Creates a winning SEO strategy

  • Promotes compatibility across platforms

So, what are some of the core testing techniques in ensuring a superlative mobile functional workflow and experience?

Automation Testing

Automation testing is one of the most successful and effective ways for regression testing during the development phase but requires a huge investment. It can help run testing processes parallel across a number of emulators as well as real devices. This app testing technique also helps in saving the configuration before execution and use per requirement. This configuration when shared across teams helps save time and results in a more effective and quality app. Some commonly used tools mobile apps test automation are:

  • Appium

  • Robotium

  • MonkeyRunner

  • UI Automator

  • Selendroid

Having said that, mobile automation still has its own challenges around identification of elements by developers as a pre-requisite, leveraging as much test code as possible between iOS and Android amongst others. While these will evolve over time, these continue to be areas of close watch at this time.

Using Emulators

Using emulators for mobile testing in the initial stages of development can prove to be useful as they can encourage rapid, effective and efficient testing in an agile development environment. These are cost-effective solutions, provides network bypass options, test script language, pseudo live environment and are useful for testing basic functionality of the mobile app during the development phase.

Simulators and emulators have expanded the scope of mobile testing, significantly especially when there are limitations on the devices available to test or even challenges around field testing. Mobile app testing, on the other hand, done on real physical devices allows the understanding of activities in real world cases. An effective mobile app testing strategy draws the right balance between real devices and emulators to get accurate results at the shortest time possible.

Performance Mobile App Testing Services

Geographical location of the user, feasibility of the network, UI, performance of the device and objectives of the mobile app are all significant factors in determining an effective mobile app testing startegy These together play a significant role in determining the performance testing approach too.

Simulating the load with all compatible devices to ensure the coverage across all platforms especially Android, and iOS, is important. This is needed as each device has its own capability when it comes to content translation and supported network. This helps in capturing the real user experience which can be used on emulators to test the different mobile devices without a physical device.

Simulating the load with the user’s network to identify and record the speed and network variation, is also very helpful. Some of the most common networks are GPRS, EDGE, 2G, 3G, 4G etc. and WiFi which provides a significantly long range of speeds, i.e from slow to high speed. Also, testing various combinations of signal strengths is recommended for performance testing because not many users with the same network strength will have the same speed.

Testing the impact of memory, CPU, battery and storage based on varied usage patters, helps in analysing the performance accurately. Devices with below par capability will affect the user’s perception of the application’s performance.

Strategic Mobile App Testing

If there’s a mobile, there is an app and if there is an app there is a chance of security breach! It thus becomes important to have strict mobile application security services to protect from data leaks and loopholes. By duplicating the threat pattern of attackers, the nature of the attack can be anticipated by analysts and a security protocol can be followed well in advance.

Using security scanning tools augmented by effective ethical hacking techniques, can be very effective when it comes to strategic security testing services. These are very useful in finding common vulnerabilities which can be resolved fairly quickly.. The vulnerabilities generally include Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection (SQLi). Irrespective of the whether done manually or in an automated manner, , it is always important to analyse the behaviour of the mobile app to ensure confidentiality, integrity and data safety.

Cloud Based App Testing

With the advent of ‘virtualization’, the methodology of sharing computer resources across networks and multiple systems came into the picture. The ideology increased scalability, enabled easy administration of the infrastructure and greatly reduced operational costs. Thus cloud computing was born and swiftly became the backbone of the digital industry. Cloud testing thus, simply refers to the testing of resources such as hardware and software which are readily available on demand over the cloud network. Let’s understand few methods which are imperative that make cloud based mobile app testing more effective.

Quality – Risky test environments often lead to faulty outcomes. These false test scenarios slow down the project and create loopholes which can end up crippling the app. High quality tests and efficient environment management remove the shortcomings of a misconfiguration and ensures accurate reporting and quality output. Cloud testing as a very effective test platform closes the loop which helps eliminating the dependency on physical sets and streamlines the communication network, ensuring quality.

Ensuring Visibility – The business needs to understand that ensuring proper visibility and feedback does not depend on one single tool; instead it is a chain of vital solutions put together on one single platform. A well implemented DevOps engine allows a proper workflow, feedback, visibility and quick delivery of the services to the customer.

Quicker Delivery – The closer you get to production, the more complex test environments become. By adding a default test rate and an efficient test rate you get improved ability to streamline deployment which helps in a shorter time to market.

With every changing device, OS platform and network type mobile app testing becomes a challenging task. Without a comprehensive and smart testing strategy that is implemented well, the app’s readiness to market cannot be determined and to this extent cloud has enabled mobile app testing significantly.

Over the last 10 yeas on an average about 20- 25% of the mobile apps get used only once. One can imagine the colossal development losses with such negligible app usage. Effective mobile app testing services ensure that your product does not go down the drain. The answer to the above lies in quality app testing services. From diving deep into the functional and non-functional features of your app to its make and platform, our engineers make sure that you have a seamless experience. For the most cost effective app testing solutions simply request a call back.

Is your eCommerce Offering Ready for the Upcoming Holiday Season?

Is your eCommerce Offering Ready for the Upcoming Holiday Season?

E-Commerce Application Testing

Global eCommerce is poised to skyrocket to $3.5 trillion in 2019 and $4.5 trillion by 2021. It is estimated that more than 95 percent of shoppers will use online channels to buy products by 2040. Businesses are adapting fast to the dynamic online ecosystem to serve their customers better.

A report by Adobe Analytics showed online sales in the last holiday season from November to December 2018 to be $126 billion in the US. The record holiday sales and promising forecasts for the future, are a strong indicator for every business to stay on top of their eCommerce game. The holiday season poses an incredible opportunity for online retailers to increase their YoY sales.

With every retailer vying to take a pie of eCommerce, competition has become stiff. Starting with Black Friday, Cyber Monday all the way to Christmas, businesses need to keep their eCommerce platforms prepared for an incredibly high volume of traffic. Normal seasons also see a high user load, necessitating a 24*7 monitoring of eCommerce platforms and applications and an ongoing curated effective digital strategy.

Here are a few essential things businesses must keep in mind to make themselves business competition-ready for the big holiday season and even otherwise.

1. Load and Performance Testing

No matter how good a deal you offer or how feature rich your application is, if your website is slow or web pages do not open up; customers will abandon it out of frustration – this is also called bounce rate where they leave your application. Hence, it should be the priority of every tester to ensure that the website is able to load swiftly in the event of high traffic.

Businesses should analyse historical data judiciously to calculate an absolute approximation of spike in traffic. Aside, other relative components including hardware, network bandwidth and database should be tested to identify whether the entire infrastructure is ready to bear the expected load or not. It would also help in adjusting the application’s performance profile accordingly.

Testers are also required to analyze the number of concurrent requests the existing systems can handle during the event of maximum load. Aside, testers need to identify whether response time for test paths is acceptable or not, analyze the reasons for weak performance and browser compatibility issues amongst others.

Appropriate load testing will also help in determining whether the website or application requires more load balancers or not. It will help in eliminating the problem of refused connections which could lead to unsatisfied customers.

2. Catalog and Segment Infrastructure – Ease of Use

The number of offers and discounts on products and services increase exponentially during the festive season. Hence, it is essential for eTailers to make sure that all the items and offers are displayed correctly on the product page.

Aside, testers should also ensure that products and related discounts are reflecting appropriately, cataloguing of the products is done correctly and browsing of products is easy. Testing all search options, the number of products displayed on each page and that there is no duplication of products on the list, are important too.

Also, make sure that pagination and filtering options are working in harmony to ensure ease of browsing for the user.

Must Visit: Mobile + Banking + Security – A Lot Of Critical Keywords In There

3. Mobile Testing

Does Best Buy’s Black Friday crash in 2014 or the Lowe’s crash of 2017 ring a bell? In both cases, customers had to abandon the deals on the checkout page. And the major reason of these infamous crashes was the surge in mobile traffic. Apart from customer frustration, it resulted in a lot of goodwill and financial loss.

More than 63 percent of people access the internet on their mobile devices. And more than half of Americans buy things on their smartphones. Aside, a growing number of millennials are more inclined towards using their smartphones to shop online for holidays and festivals. Hence, it is crucial for every eCommerce business to make their website as mobile-friendly as possible.

Testers need to ensure that mobile performance of the eCommerce platform is top-notch. The mobile website or application should not crumble under the heavy load of users. Apart from testing the overall performance of the website, testers need to identify and analyse problems including mobile latency and run mobile network speed simulation to ensure optimal performance on the mobile platform.

4. Shopping Cart and Payment

Shoppers often abandon the deal at the payment stage due to the slow performance of the eCommerce platform. Test engineers need to make sure that the entire checkout process is user-friendly and fast. Testers need to make sure that all the discount codes are working correctly. Regression testing should be done on all inactive and active discount codes.

Aside, make sure that discount codes are not adding unwanted load on the database as this can significantly impact the performance of the website during peak load times. And finally, testers need to identify whether all payment options are working efficiently under peak load conditions or not.

Recommended: Why Security Testing Holds a Specific Seat in the Healthcare Industry

5. Security

eCommerce websites become the most loved targets for hackers during the festive and holiday season because they handle a lot of personal and financial data of customers. A shocking report revealed that almost 29 percent of website traffic is to attack the sanctity of eCommerce portals. And the risk increases manifold during the holiday season.

Hence, testers should make sure the eCommerce website and application’s security is not compromised by any means. Analysis of secured handling of incoming and outgoing data, payment gateway, and penetration testing to identify and rectify vulnerabilities should be done thoroughly. Aside, a multi-layered security approach should be implemented to make security ironclad.

In summary, eCommerce website or application is the digital gateway to your business endeavours. Hence, it is essential to embrace the right testing strategy which enables you to achieve desired results by delivering a flawless buying experience to your customers.

QA InfoTech is a leading name in delivering exceptional testing solutions to clients globally. Contact us to help you make your eCommerce business ready for the upcoming holidays.