Everything you wanted to know about testing your e-commerce site

The e-commerce industry in India has grown manifold. The last quarter of 2020 saw its order volume growing by 36% according to a report. This growth was also triggered because of COVID-19 and the changed habits of the people due to the lockdown. It has forced Quality Analysis (QA) engineers to focus on more different types of testing due to the increased user base, and many such users will be using the platform for the first time. Hence it is going to be very important for all online e-commerce players to focus on the stability and quality of their platforms. So in this article, we are going to talk about the various testing types that are required for testing an e-commerce website.

Functional Testing of the E-commerce Platform

A QA engineer needs to test all the functionalities of all the pages like Home, product search, PDP (Product description page), Catalog, Cart, Payment gateways, order management, filter and sort, pagination, etc. Primarily. these pages are common in all e-commerce platforms. These aspects are tested manually or via automated means using automated tools like Selenium, Appium for mobile.

Performance Testing

We know how Big Billion Day sales went in the past for Flipkart or Amazon. They made high revenue and profits during these sale days but the numbers could be even higher if there were no technical glitches due to which their server got slow during the peak load. Hence many orders were not placed and users left the platform in frustration.

Hence it is important for all the e-commerce companies to ensure that there platforms are tested for performance and load testing using load testing tools and the infrastructure that is planned to be in the production. Many tools like JMeter, Loadrunner, Browserstack, Perfecto mobile can be used for the same.

Usability Testing

Due to the pandemic, we also need to understand that a lot of new users particularly from Tier 2 and 3 cities have moved to e-commerce and digitization. Hence it is important to take care of the usability flows so that the new users find it easy and user friendly to use.

Mobile & Compatibility Testing

As per market trends, about 70-75% of users prefer to browse on their mobile devices and about 35-40% purchases are done on mobiles, so it is quite vital to ensure that the e-commerce platform is tested for cross browsers and on different mobile devices of different brands and operating systems. The QA engineering teams, hence, need to focus on compatibility testing.

Security & Penetration Testing

To build the trust of the users, e-commerce organizations have to ensure that their platforms are keeping user identity and their payment information secure. Conventional security and penetration testing is not optimum these days. The QA engineering team needs to test the user flows particularly around the order management, payment gateway, user profile, rewards program, etc. to unearth the vulnerabilities and breaches.

The above are some basic tests and testing types that are very essential. Many other testing types can also be included in the set.

Guest contributor Avneesh Agarwal is the Founder and CEO of SpeckyFox Technologies India Pvt Ltd., experts in Web Development, Mobile Development, and Software QA and Testing. Any opinions expressed in this article are strictly that of the author.