eCommerce Testing: What to Test in an eCommerce Website

eCommerce Testing is a key to High Retail Sales

Business thrives on factors such as high retail sales, exceptional user experience, strengthened customer loyalty… And all this is not more important than a presentable eCommerce website with an attractive and user-friendly User Interface. Contextually, eCommerce Testing is a key to achieve all such business objectives.

Testing an eCommerce Website

Software Testing has emerged as the biggest business imperative for the e-commerce retailers, who wish to guarantee hassle-free commendable shopping experience to their customers. To achieve this profitable end, every software has to undergo multiple regression tests – an activity that requires massive QA talent and time. Repetitive functional testing of the ever-changing code is a burdensome activity and it is here that automated testing enacts the saviour when it, along with QA engineers, carries out large number of regression tests to ensure software quality, usability, security, and overall performance, thereby providing the best of customized e-commerce solutions.

Features of E-commerce Websites

Most of the e-commerce websites have the following structure

• Home Page
• Category Page
• Search Results Page
• Product Details Page
• Shopping Cart
• Checkout Page
• Payment Page

Web Pages and Payment Gateway

It is mandatory for a software tester to make sure that there is an effective synchronization between the above mentioned front-end pages, and the back-end services such as Product Search Service, Content services, Booking Service, Gateways, etc. Further, an extra effort is devoted to the Checkout page since it involves the culmination of the shopping experience of a customer. The checkout page should be bug-free so that it ensures transactional integrity. Ideally, the website should offer a smooth order processing and payment processing, to achieve which, testing should be carried out on all the paying methods such as:

• Payment through Debit Card                                          
• Payment through Credit Card
• Payment through Paypal
• Payment through Google Checkout
• Visa Debit Payment
• Mastercard Payment

Browser Compatibility

It is extremely important to test a website in different browsers, in order to increase the number of your targeted audience. With the availability of your website on all the browsers, you will be able to reach all of your customers. Testing should cover the main platforms such as Linux, Windows, Mac, and it should be done to find out if the software runs on all the web browsers such as Internet Explorer 7,, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari.

Page Display and Mobile Compatibility

The website looks promising only if it is free from the most-likely errors such as incorrect display of pages, poor page download time, runtime error messages, dead hyperlink, and plugin dependency. Software testing tools should also be applied exhaustively to ensure that the pages or websites are responsive enough to adjust to the device screen, size, and resolution. Inaccurate display of pages usually turns out to be a big problem if the website has been tested upon only for a few devices. It is advisable that a website should be tested so that it runs on all the devices including  tablets and phones using Android Operating System, Windows etc.

                     

Shopping Carts

Shopping Carts carry all the items that a customer wishes to purchase. It is important to test whether or not the shopping cart responds to the actions of a customer. For instance, the cart should show the appropriate quantity, images, and details of the products, and it should also respond to other activities such as deleting one or more product from the cart, or redirecting to the product page if one clicks on the image, and so on.

Performance and System Integration

Performance is the key criteria when it comes to measuring the success of an eCommerce website. Performance depends on various factors such as throughput and response time. There is always a need to put such factors to test in order to have a clear picture about load handling, scalability analysis, and performance bottlenecks. Secondly, testing is equally essential for system integration. Various testing tools are used to verify Data Interface Format, Interface Frequency, Interface Volume Capacity, and Integrated Performance.

eCommerce testing is not an easy process, as it might appear to be. It includes testing so many elements using different types of testing processes and tools. Software testing on an ecommerce website usually includes wide range of tests and tools such as Web Services Testing, Performance Testing, Cross-Browser Web Testing, analyzing HTTP traffic, testing responsive websites and mobile testing, and above all, it includes broad spectrum of testing such as exploratory testing and test automation using tools such as Selenium WebDriver and so on.

With the widened virtual domain of the eCommerce industry and with the consequent increasing need to test all the elements, there occurs a demand of software testing professionals who have in-depth understanding of automated testing and Selenium WebDriver. ETLhive offers extensive training in Software Testing and Selenium, and also imparts elaborate lectures on diverse topics such as Automation testing and its Existence, Selenium and its Background, Industry Acceptance and Recognition in Indian IT Industry, Niche of Selenium, Selenium IDE, Selenium WebDriver,JAVA for Webdriver, Frameworks in Automation: JUNIT Framework, TestNG Framework, and many more. ETLhive is indeed the best training Institute for Selenium where you will undergo hand-on training in Selenium and Selenium WebDriver.