The mobile e-commerce market has grown rapidly in the last few years. In fact, the revenue numbers have also increased from just 1.36 in 2017 to $3.56 trillion in 2021, accounting for more than half of the e-commerce sales in 2021.
Moreover, since the pandemic, online shopping has only grown, and this trend is likely to continue in the future. So, businesses need to focus on ensuring smoother e-commerce apps for their customers.
But, how to ensure it?
While there are multiple ways to ensure it, the most important step is always emphasizing the robustness of the software testing services.
Here are some factors to highlight the importance of a software testing:
Boost user engagement
When it comes to online shopping, user engagement plays a critical role. User engagement is usually considered directly proportional to online traffic and sales. As a result, businesses tend to focus more on how to boost user engagement on their respective shopping platforms.
In E-commerce apps, User Interface & User Experience (UI/UX) play a crucial role in improving online customers’ journeys. A seamless customer journey results in better customer engagement. Therefore, organizations must ensure smooth navigation, better usability, enhanced accessibility and design for their mobile apps.
Businesses follow the best practices to satisfy the UI/UX parameters during the app development process. But software applications often lack the desired quality parameters in some form or the other. And only through comprehensive software testing can businesses detect and work on this lacuna.
Enhance cyber security
Making payments are an essential part of e-commerce shopping. There is no point in boosting traffic and user engagement on e-commerce apps if users cannot pay for the purchase online.
When an online payment is involved, many security aspects come into the picture, from financial to personal information. So, businesses need to secure such sensitive information at all costs.
Moreover, it is not sufficient for e-commerce businesses to stick to just one digital payment method. They need to have multiple online payment options such as Credit Card, Debit Card, PayPal, Net Banking, Installments, etc.
As a result, businesses must also safeguard the safety of their customers’ sensitive data in all those payment gateways. Moreover, even though these payments are processed via SSL encrypted servers, the complications in ensuring secured transactions increase.
This is where cyber security testing comes into the picture. It helps organizations verify, validate, and strengthen their existing security infrastructure.
Augment app functionalities
UI/UX and cybersecurity are good. But today’s online shoppers also love customization, such as advanced filtering and product searching options. The more functionality an e-commerce app has, the more customization it can provide. Therefore, making it more popular, it is among its users.
However, merely having functionality does not guarantee that customers can use it without any errors. QA teams must test every functionality and improve on it in case of any defects. However, in functionality testing, another challenge for QA engineers is the redundancy of verifying similar test cases.
For example, in the case of product search, QA engineers must check every filter option to ensure that it is providing the correct results. In e-commerce apps, there are numerous filter options, so manually testing each of them can be a cumbersome task. Therefore, most organizations seek to automate functional testing processes in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
Sustain uniform app performance
In this fast-pacing world, app users have very high expectations. Even with the slightest disappointment, customers will readily leave the platform for a different e-commerce app. As per a study, 61 percent of mobile users want their app to start within four seconds and if the app crashes or freezes, 53 percent of users will uninstall it.
Moreover, there is no dearth of mobile apps. So, e-commerce businesses cannot afford their respective customers to get frustrated due to slow-loading apps or app crashes. Once the customers start leaving, they don’t just leave the platform. Most customers also submit a negative review on the App Store/Play Store, discouraging new customers from downloading the respective app.
Performance testing is key to ensuring that businesses are focused on the app’s performance issues, such as load time and crashes. While validating the performance of the apps, the QA teams take into account different mobile devices.
Accelerate technology transformation
The evolution of technology is an ongoing process. However, various new technologies have disrupted the status quo in the last few years. Most of these have the potential to revolutionize every aspect of our day-to-day operations. So, organizations across the industry spectrum, including e-commerce, are usually eager to adopt them to stay ahead of the curve.
Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Product Visualization, etc., are some of the recent technology trends in e-commerce. However, e-commerce businesses understand that merely adopting technology cannot guarantee its success. Therefore, whether these technologies are integrated into the app or website, they must be thoroughly tested by the QA experts.
Moreover, integrating new technologies in the application is comparatively more complicated than assimilating them on the website. So, : QA testing plays a far more important role when it comes to technology adoption for e-commerce apps.
Parting thoughts
Most e-commerce businesses know the importance of software testing. But they mostly struggle when it comes to testing the apps themselves. There are numerous factors that QA teams need to consider in QA testing. Some of the most important ones include understanding the real-world scenarios, configuring a suitable testing environment, etc.
Moreover, testing is not just a one-time thing. It’s a continuous process because they are always room for improvement. So, e-commerce businesses cannot just rely on a single version of the app. They need to bring in regular updates taking into account different customer feedback.
Usually, organizations need to focus on operations, and they do have the bandwidth to factor in all these issues. Moreover, they are also not technologically well equipped to perform QA testing, whether it’s availability testing or digital testing. So, they prefer outsourcing their testing process to experienced Quality Engineering companies such as Qualities.