Your eCommerce website must be resilient to fulfill the demands of your clients as the number of online buyers grows. Having a solid e-commerce website is no longer enough; you must upgrade it to fit your company’s current needs and ambitions. Furthermore, your e-commerce website should list products to encourage customers to interact with the site and convert more quickly.

Your website should be evaluated and upgraded regularly. It is critical to test your eCommerce website UI thoroughly. It ensures that your users engage with a bug-free website, improving their overall experience (user friendly). You check the web site’s functionality, assess how it works across different devices (mobile devices), and assess the threats it poses during the testing process.

Let’s look at the significance and advantages of evaluating your retail website.

Need for eCommerce Website Testing

After building your eCommerce website, you would need to test it. The main goal of comprehensive eCommerce website UI testing is to improve the user experience, and implementing a VPN can be useful in testing security aspects. Your user will not find your website engaging if it takes too long to load (load time) or is riddled with bugs. As a result, they will abandon the product pages even before they have interacted with them.

Second, website testing reveals the website’s specific flaws. It also helps in the enhancement of the web site’s operation and security. Overall, eCommerce testing helps organizations communicate, nurture, and convert users by providing an appropriate app/website.

We’ll walk you through the advantages of eCommerce testing so you can comprehend. API Testing can also be done on eCommerce websites. 

Benefits of eCommerce Website Testing

 eCommerce Website UI Testing Benefits

1. Better engagement
2. Reduced risks
3. Improved conversions
4. Data for user insights

Quality Risks eCommerce Testing can Prevent

eCommerce UI Testing Quality Risks that can  be prevented

When you start a business with no money, you need to ensure all preventable risks are avoided. eCommerce UI testing can prevent the following:

• Unavailability of the Online Store

It’s a rather typical problem, particularly during peak season. It happens when there’s a problem with the server, hosting, or provider. It could be due to the large traffic volume during the holiday shopping season. The error page appears, or users receive the message “site is unavailable,” resulting in negative experiences.

• Unable to Find Products

Many of us visit eCommerce stores to locate certain products or brands. When you are unable to locate a particular product, you are disappointed. You frequently abandon a cart containing other items because you are unable to locate a single item. It may result in a loss for the retailers.

• Performance Issues

Your website has serious performance concerns if it loads (page loads) slower than usual or if users are unable to navigate it. Abandonment and low conversion rates might result from operational difficulties. It can potentially affect your store’s earnings as visitors migrate to faster-loading sites.

• Shopping Cart Issues

Imagine finding a product but being unable to purchase it. Isn’t that worse than not being able to locate the item? These problems arise when your website has not been thoroughly examined. It may even cause customers to leave your website, as they will quickly go to another marketplace that offers the same things. The user being unable to add the coupon code is another difficulty in this area. Failure to test this section of the site can result in serious security risks while doing transactions.

• Improper Analytics

The results will be useless if your analytics isn’t up to par or isn’t configured correctly. You won’t obtain the metrics you need to evaluate your conversion rate, profitability, or investment returns. Eventually, it will have an impact on your eCommerce business strategy.

• Incompetent UX

You may convert visitors into buyers by using the layout, language, movement, and overall context. However, conversions will suffer if one of the website’s multiple components is malfunctioning. For example, if the browsing or checkout experience (checkout process) is poor, users would abandon the website. One can mitigate this risk by ensuring that your testing procedure is error-free.

What should you know before doing an eCommerce test?

Things to know before running an eCommerce UI test

You may evaluate the feasibility of every piece of your website, from the source code to product pages, using a variety of testing methods. Some of the most common ways are as follows:

1. Functional testing
2. Usability testing
3. Security testing
4. Performance testing 
5. Database testing
6. Mobile application testing (mobile app testing)

Each of these methodologies has its set of laws and restrictions, executing numerous tests using different testing methods at the same time might create havoc and cause test results to be thrown off. As a result, it’s best to run one test at a time or use a decent testing tool like VWO that allows you to run numerous tests at the same time without them overlapping.

Given this, you must prioritize the order in which you wish to execute tests based on the test’s overall conversion rate impact. Agile Testing, which is utilized by software testing teams, can assist you in finding the right balance.

Prioritize significant defects and software issues that affect everyone by conducting mobile app and internet testing first. After you’ve resolved these difficulties, you can focus on the minor bugs.

E-Commerce Testing Checklist

Essential segments and test cases for eCommerce website testing are described below. 

1. Homepage

The homepages of retail websites are crowded. However, almost all of them have a Hero Image.

This is the kind of clickable image (sort of a slideshow) that takes up most of the page.

The following are some ideas to test:

• Is it going to scroll on its own (automatically)?
• If that’s the case, how often will the image be updated?
• When the user hovers over it, does it still proceed to the next one?
• Is hovering over it possible?
• Is there a way to click on it?
• Is it pointing you to the right page and deal, if so?
• Is it loading at the same time (simultaneously) as the rest of the web page or after the other elements?
• Is there any way to view the rest of the content?
• Does it seem the same in different browsers and at different screen resolutions?

2. Search

Because we can’t always get what customers (target audience) want to see directly in front of their eyes, search algorithms are vital to the success of a retail site.

Typical testing includes:

1. Search by (on the search bar) product name, brand name, or category, to name a few. 
2. Relevant search results are required.
3. Various choices should be offered, including Brand, Price, and Reviews/Ratings, among others.
4. How many results per web page should be shown?
5. Are there any methods for navigating to multi-page results?
6. Furthermore, the search occurs in several locations. When validating this function, please consider the search drilling down into multiple levels.

3. Product Details Page

The user will be brought to the product information (product descriptions) page after finding a product through the search functionality, browsing, or clicking on it from the homepage.

Check:

1. Product images
2. Price of the product
3. Product specifications
4. Reviews
5. Check out options
6. Delivery options
7. Shipping information
8. In-stock/Out of stock
9. Multiple color or variations options
10. The categories’ breadcrumb navigation (highlighted in red below). If such navigation is presented, ensure that every part of it is working.

4. Shopping Cart

This is the final stage before the user makes a purchasing decision.

Perform the following tests:

• Continue online shopping after adding goods to the cart (add to cart).
• If the user proceeds to shop while adding the same item to the cart, the item count in the shopping cart should be increased.
• The cart should show all of the products and their totals.
• Location-based taxes should be applied.
• A user can add more goods to their cart, and the total should match.
• Update the cart contents; the total should also reflect this.
• Remove the products from the shopping cart.
• Proceed to the payment page.
• Calculate the cost of shipping using multiple shipping alternatives.
• Use coupons.
• Don’t check out; instead, close the website and return later. The products in the shopping cart should be kept on the site.

5. Payments

• Examine multiple payment options.
• If you want to allow visitors to check out, simply finish the purchase and allow them to register at the end.
• Customers who return – Check out by logging in.
• User registration is required.
• If you are storing a customer’s credit card/financial information, make sure it’s safe by performing security testing.
• (Compliance with PCI is required.)
• Check whether the user’s session has timed out or if they have been signed up for a long time. Every website has its threshold. It takes 10 minutes for some. It could be different for other websites.
• Confirmation emails or text messages with the order number generated

6. Categories/Featured Products/Related or Recommended Products

Do I have to test every product/category?

NO is the response.

If you’re a repeat client, you’ll see some suggested products on the home page or in your shopping basket.

Because they are dynamic features, the best method to test these sections of the application is to test the algorithm that populates them.

Check your data mining/BI systems and the queries that populate these parts from the backend.

7. After-Order Tests

Check:

1. Change the Order
2. Cancel the Order
3. Track the Order
4. Returns

8. Other Tests

1. Login
2. FAQs
3. Contact Us page
4. Customer Support page etc.

Additional information

eCommerce UI testing Additional information 

• The only method for eCommerce firms to withstand today’s market heat, keep their customer base, and secure revenue development, according to experience optimizers around the world, is to engage heavily in modern marketing activities and focus their resources on testing and optimization.
• Accessibility automation testing with keyboard actions instead of mouse activities, you will almost certainly find and correct some issues. This is very important in user interface testing.
• On their checkout pages, eCommerce websites such as amazon did an A/B test to see how they may emphasize the free returns policy for certain products. On the left is the control, and on the right is the variant.
• Regardless of how skillfully you develop your website, there will always be bugs in your wireframe that will disrupt the functionality of your site or obstruct the visitor’s trip. Developers used to be powerless in the face of problems, but now they can employ testing to fix them and create seamless UI/UX designs.
• Your CTA, social proof, photos, videos, recommended items, highlighted products, and other features on a product page can all be tested. Changes to any of these items have the potential to boost shopping cart and payment gateway conversion rates.
• When performing tests in parallel, your script will fail. In this case, one will need to reload your page regularly to save your card information. This situation, in which a consumer utilizes both a mobile e-commerce app and a mobile e-commerce web application, may occur in real-time.
• The tester should carefully plan the scenario and include an initiate checkpoint and login script wherever necessary.
• When a customer is about to leave your website, Usersnap can be configured to detect exit intent and send a feedback pop-up. Because a bright animation (website design) is more likely to catch their attention, the response rate will provide you some insight into why they left.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website’s technical configuration, content relevancy, and link popularity so that its pages are easier to locate, more relevant, more popular for user search queries/questions, and search engines rank them higher as a result.

Conclusion

You managed to capture the attention of the users with your marketing efforts. So, what’s next? After browsing your website, you want them to convert. It is not possible, however, if they encounter difficulties while engaging with your website.

Testing the eCommerce site UI will provide you with a complete understanding of how it functions and which elements make it difficult. After considering these factors, you may eliminate errors and reduce risks. For minimal abandonment and maximum conversions, you should focus on the home page, category page, and product pages, as well as a checkout.

Author

Jonathan Aisiki is a Senior Writer at MarketingForCustomers.com. He writes B2B articles and develops SaaS marketing material that achieves measurable results. His purpose is to educate and provide readers with as much distinct value as possible.