E-commerce sales in 2023 stood at $4.89 trillion and are expected to grow to $5.4 trillion in 2024.
Online shopping has become a norm due to pandemics and customers demand safer and more convenient shopping experiences.
Delivering a reliable and flawless customer experience has become the top priority for businesses globally.
With such intense competition, it has become business-critical for e-commerce vendors to ensure apps are both reliable and scalable as per the market demands even during peak load hours.
Why E-commerce Websites Need Load Testing?
E-commerce websites have greater chances of suffering downtime under high traffic because of the nature of browsing and transactions.
Any downtime can impact the revenue negatively and bring disrepute to the brand. Traffic on e-commerce sites can also spike abruptly during an end-of-season sale.
If the website is not load tested properly, users may suffer from longer load time, failed transactions, or downtime, ruining the entire customer experience.
Thorough load testing can ensure that users experience a smoother experience even during high traffic and execute purchases efficiently.
Load testing can be considered equivalent to risk mitigation. It can help in identifying and resolving performance bottleneck issues.
Eight Major Checkpoints Of E-commerce Testing
1. Lower Bounce Rate
In e-commerce apps, page load speed is always a top priority. Application page load time determines whether a user will remain on an e-commerce application or not.
It is a critical differentiator that many businesses overlook when outsourcing their e-commerce testing to Load testing services.
Google research found that when websites took more than three seconds to load, 53% of clicks did not result in page views.
Thus, the simple fact of retaining customers is that your e-commerce app must be extremely fast.
2. Payments
A successful e-commerce website should be able to facilitate flawless online payment solutions.
Be it an in-house payment system or a third-party payment gateway, it should be tested with the maximum number of simultaneous users trying to execute the payment transactions.
It will help in minimizing cart abandonment and ensuring a maximum number of purchases are done.
3. Common User Paths
E-commerce websites consist of multiple critical users flows that should work accurately under peak traffic conditions.
It may include login, registration, product page, shopping cart, and checkout among others. QA should ensure robust scripting of these user paths and flows.
They should be tested under peak loads to identify potential performance bottlenecks that can impact the website.
4. Back-End Integrations
Front-end activities on e-commerce websites trigger back-end events including logistics actions, invoicing, and printing, among others.
During peak traffic, the back end can become unresponsive due to higher user transactions.
Load testing of back-end integrations is essential along with CRM and logistics, to ensure stability in the system.
5. Third-Party Services
E-commerce websites rely on many third-party features including chatbot, payment gateway, content delivery, and more.
Load testing of third-party plugins or services can help e-commerce websites perform accurately under peak load situations.
6. Robust Inventory Management
Inventory management is the backbone of any e-commerce website. With every product uploaded by the business or bought by customers, several records need to be updated simultaneously to prevent confusion and faulty transactions.
For instance, if there are only 100 items in the inventory of a particular product, and the customer places an order of 136 items, then the website should not take that order to avoid problems.
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Load testing of inventory management can help in detecting and rectifying such problems.
7. Email And Messaging
After the order completion or during promotions, e-commerce websites communicate through SMS, email, and other mediums.
These are one of the easiest mediums to send alerts and confirmations to customers.
Load testing of these features under peak conditions is crucial to identify bottlenecks and interruptions.
8. Tokens And Cookies
As users navigate through an e-commerce application, multiple cookies and tokens are generated including authentication token, CSRF (Cross-site request forgery) token, session cookies, chat token, location cookies, browser cookies, and more.
These cookies and tokens help in facilitating a smooth and flawless customer experience. Load testing of tokens and cookies can help in ensuring that they are generated efficiently and accurately during high traffic.
In Summary
E-commerce website load testing helps in fixing stability, speed, and scalability during peak traffic load conditions.
It is business-critical to thoroughly test both lesser-used and most-used user behaviors under maximum traffic situations.
Outsourcing your Performance testing services to a capable team of QA testers is beneficial in making your e-commerce site ready for the upcoming season and ensuring its performance as per your expectations.
Load test case scenarios should be conducted in as realistic situations as possible through real devices, browsers, and geo-locations among others.
QA engineers can also leverage cloud testing for large applications that need to be deployed globally for more efficient results.
