Every year we are overwhelmed by the statistics of shopping during the holiday shopping season. This year is not going to be any different as bigger projections have been made towards online shopping, especially mobile shopping. E-Commerce vendors have been preparing meticulously for months to get the best out of this holiday shopping season.
As much as it is exciting to comprehend awe-inspiring online shopping statistics during the holiday shopping every year, sadly embarrassing moments are often recorded from failed attempts in delighting customers.
The last thing any e-commerce vendor would want is any disruption during the peak sales season on Black Friday and Cyber Monday due to technology related nightmare. Frustrated customers not only abandon the website but also damage the brand’s reputation with viral word-of-mouth reviews.
In 2016, Dell’s website crashed after it offered discounts on it Inspiron range of laptops.
Similar incidents have been reported with Curry’s PC World, Macy’s due to lack of preparedness in handling unimaginable traffic overload.
While there is still time, here is a brief checklist for ensuring your portals are season ready to reap maximum online sales conversions.
A 2016 Holiday Retail Insights Report, which analyzed 1.5 million beacons’ worth of user data for 2014 and 2015, found that 2.4 seconds as the “sweet spot” for peak conversions across all device types.
1. Performance and Load Testing:
Millennials are the key target audience for online shopping this year. They have superior benchmarks for their preferred shopping platforms. Performance is key to win their wallet share. Identify and determine the essential performance and load testing for your e-commerce portals and mobile apps to handle peak load traffic.
- Load Tests – Load testing helps in determining how your e-commerce application would behave under the expected load. It also helps in determining the maximum number of concurrent users an app can handle.
- Soak Tests – Soak testing is useful to determine if an application can hold the huge number of online shoppers for a long period of time without crashing under the pressure. For e.g. a website will be able to handle a huge amount of load for 3 hours. But will it be able to handle the same load for more than 10 hours.
- Stress Tests – In general, e-commerce sites will experience a surge in traffic. Stress testing can be used to test the application’s stability under such extreme traffic conditions.
- Spike Tests – Spike testing is performed to determine how an application handles a sudden surge in load by the number of concurrent users. It is also called data volume testing.
- Isolation Tests – Isolation testing is the process of breaking down the system into a series of isolated modules which makes it easier to spot the bottlenecks. It can be time-consuming because of the need to divide the system into modules but can prove useful when the issue is difficult to identify. Outputs from each of the modules are then verified.
Once you know which tests are suitable for your business platform, it’s time to start executing the tests. Don’t run tests based on predetermined goals but rather test to the limit until the platform reaches its breaking point. This way the platform’s maximum capacity and it’s threshold can be understood in real-time.
2. Run tests on all variants of devices
In 2017, More than half of millennials (58%) will shop on their phone or tablet, with 21% making at least half of their holiday purchases on mobile.Increasingly, most shoppers prefer to shop from their mobile devices and tablets as opposed to the desktop browsers. Mobiles, tablets, and desktops run on different operating systems, configurations, multiple resolutions and browser versions. It is therefore imperative to run visual, functional and performance tests on all these devices to make sure that applications appear, behave and perform the same way across all these device fragmentations.
Performing these tests manually is not possible. Deploy test automation in a continuous testing basis as newer functionality, feature releases could be rolled out with absolute confidence and after thorough testing.
79% of shoppers who aren’t satisfied with a website are most likely not going to visit that website again resulting in loss of future revenue.
3. Measures and Results
Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) for means monitoring and tracking actual results will help in staying on track while achieving desired outputs. Below listed are few key metrics that every e-Commerce business needs to be tracking in real-time.
- Number of users – To check if the website can withstand the load, “virtual users” are created to simulate real users. These “virtual users’ act like real users on a site. The simulation of real users enables the QA to identify bottlenecks in the servers. This method saves a website from crashing due to real-time traffic spikes. However, it is necessary to keep increasing the number of “virtual users” till the site breaks to identify the maximum capabilities.
- Response Time – Response time is the amount of time the server takes to respond to a request. The more traffic that comes to the site, the slower the response time will be. It is not only necessary to optimize your website, but also to improve your servers based on the load. The best option would be to use cloud servers that have auto-scaling functionality.
- Latency – Latency helps in measuring the time delay that takes place during the transmission of data from client to server.
- Connect Time – Connect Time measures the time taken to connect to the server and the response time of the server.
- Throughput – Throughput indicates the number of bytes/sec i.e. data flowing to and from the servers. Throughput is the amount of capacity an application can handle. Throughput is the number of transactions per second that can be handled during a test. If an application receives 70 requests per second but can only handle 30 then the other 40 requests are waiting in a queue.
4. Live Monitoring
Businesses use 24/7 application monitoring services to closely track the performance, health, security, incident management, audience engagement of their cloud-hosted web and mobile applications. This helps e-Commerce businesses focus on their core job during the peak seasons and not get disrupted by any technical issues. Several 3rd party network operations centers offer a wide range of services tailored to meet specific requirements. Live monitoring if outsourced or handled in-house, below are few areas that an e-Commerce company should typically focus on.
a. Monitor the conversion paths
- Check if the path to conversion is smooth and free of errors
- Check if customers are able to add a product to cart
- Check if customers are able to place orders successfully
- Check if customers receive a confirmation email once the order is placed
- Check if transactions are processed in a faster manner
- Test the functionality various modes of payment
- Check if orders can be cancelled before confirming the order
- Check if there are unusual patterns with respect to shopping cart abandonment
b. Monitor the performance of landing pages
- Check if the homepage and product pages load fast
- Check the product page to see the correct images are shown for the products.
- Check if the redirects are working precisely
- Check if the navigation between pages is smooth
- Check the description of each product.
- Make sure the call-to-action buttons work as designed
- Check if the website is responsive
- Make sure the web pages are user friendly (i.e. user should find it easy to navigate).
- Make sure banner ads are displayed properly and do not overlap.
- Make sure the correct products are placed in the correct category.
- Check if the correct price is displayed for each product.
c. Monitor Secondary website functions
- Check if the search functionality is working properly
- Check user registration procedure
- Check if user is able to login
- Check social integration.
- Check responsiveness of 24/7 customer support
- Check if product can be successfully added to wish list
- Check if users can track their orders
- Check if users can edit their account details like addresses or add money to wallet
- Check if products stored in shopping cart are still there even after logging out and logging back in
d. Monitor the critical infrastructure
- Check the server response time
- Check the amount of load that the server can handle
- Check web content management system
- Check whether security systems helps prevent unauthorized access
- Check if there is a plan in place in case of site outage
- Check if the database servers are capable of storing large amounts of data
Conclusion
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday right around the corner, e-commerce vendors must make additional measures to ensure their respective e-commerce applications are prepared for the ultimate test. Each new visitor means lots of potential for new business. Each customer means more recurring relationships. We hope the above checklist helps in ensuring your e-commerce applications are geared up for the big event.
