Why Ecommerce Website Performance Testing is Important?

Due to booming Ecommerce, the performance factor is more crucial than ever. To maintain both brand value and revenue, ecommerce companies need to provide a shopping experience that is fast, secure, and reliable. Fast experience with rich content is an important task. More loading time contributes to page abandonment and user conversions as users are less tolerant of performance issues. Software performance testing is a non-functional testing type that plays a vital role in an organization’s successful business and reputation.

To understand the vitality of ecommerce performance testing for a successful business, let’s take an example of a heavy discount period such as Black Friday in an ecommerce application. Business owners (marketing /sales persons) publish the advertisement on TV, Radio, emails, SMS notifications, etc., to make users aware of the offers held for limited durations to increase their sales index. Many users will throng the application/website to avail of lucrative offers. Users will be engrossed in shortlisting goods, adding them to their cart, and doing payment activities for a long time.

Ecommerce Website Performance Testing

Suppose a user faces a considerable response time to load the page, add items to the cart, or issues in payment procedures (white page, transactions cannot be processed). In that case, it gives an unpleasant experience with the particular app or website. Due to all these frustrating experiences, people lose faith in the application. These unacceptable experiences increase user conversion rate and may benefit competitors’ businesses. Also, this news will spread in no time due to online rating/review options available in the cyber age, which will negatively impact new buyers. So, buyers’ visits will decrease, and business ROI will be impacted.

Due to all these issues, even smart business strategies will not lure customers, unable to add desired benefits, and sales will decrease. Response time plays a critical role in an ecommerce business. Response time is inversely proportional to the business success factor. Black Fridays’ are crucial for business owners. Since many users will be accessing the site for a long duration of time so this may lead to memory leakage, and the user will undergo an unpleasant experience. This is what usually happens to major ecommerce sites. To combat rivals, more lucrative offers given to customers will be fruitful only if the user can complete the purchase activities impeccably. If we want to benefit from this, then the application should be able to accommodate a large number of users without losing quality attributes. The application’s response should be reasonable and well-maintained to keep the customers engaged on our website. Also, page loading time is equally important for search engine rankings. A slow response will drive the customer away from the website and contribute to the conversion rate. Read the blog: Best practices for Testing Web Applications

Can we get rid of this kind of problem? The answer is YES!

Ecommerce performance testing is the best solution! If there exists a legacy website, then we can get an idea about the number of users, else we can find out the limit that our website/app will support using a ecommerce performance test. The application should be able to handle anticipated user load for long durations without any errors or exceptions. Performance factors should be considered from the beginning phase of the software development cycle so that architecture and other factors can be designed based on the current and future growth of the business. But in reality, ecommerce performance testing comes into the picture very late, and less time is allocated for ecommerce performance testing, which worsens the situation.

Performance issues detected late in SDLC costs are high on budget and are more difficult to fix. Below are some tips to ensure the best performance of your application.

• Targeting for the best performance output, performance suite should be executed using ecommerce performance testing tools (e.g., Apache JMeter, BlazeMeter, HP LoadRunner, NeoLoad, Visual studio load test tool, LoadImpact, Rational Performance Tester, etc.) in the environment, which is a replica of a production environment.
• Do not leave ecommerce performance testing for the last week before go-live. In this case, performance bugs have crept into production, which may be difficult and costly. Create a test strategy for a successful ecommerce performance test by considering factors such as - user behavior, how a user interacts with the site, average concurrent users, application area where most of the users are engaged, and geographic location from where maximum traffic is expected.
• The database is the heart of any application. So, all critical transactions should be watched and optimized
• Make sure the application handles peak load during peak hours. Run ecommerce load test scenarios in realistic conditions in a production environment. Also, all types of ecommerce performance tests should be run completely with load, stress, spike, endurance, and isolation tests to remove all Performance-related issues beforehand. Before announcing new offers on your ecommerce website, the most critical Transaction and pages should be examined. If problems like slowness, memory leak, etc., are encountered, these should be fixed before rolling out offers as they will impact end users and businesses.
• Monitor all components of the infrastructure (all servers, load balancers, databases) regularly as part of the health check of the application/website.
• Endurance tests should be performed since ecommerce applications/websites are accessed by users for long durations. Due to programming bugs, memory leaks can occur, leading to increased memory use and sudden system crash.
• Use analytics tools to find the users’ most visited pages and real user trends to access websites or applications. Based on this information, keep on improving the ecommerce performance test suite for better efficiency.
• Check performance considering different geographic locations so that customers from different locations have a good experience while accessing.
• There can be cases where response time will be high. To present it well and not waste the user’s time, there can be some messages displayed (For example Transaction is in progress and may take some time to complete”) on the website.

To Conclude

An E-commerce application is a system of complex processes which require thorough understanding and expert-level Testing. Ecommerce performance testing is a top priority in this domain because a drop in the performance of your website can make you lose thousands of customers. Think about it!

About Jade Global’s QA Services

Jade Global is a premier Advisory, Integration, Testing, Cloud & Consulting Services, Business Solutions, and IT Outsourcing company that services clients across multiple technology platforms. It provides the best Quality Assurance and Testing services, which can increase accuracy and productivity through a reduction in cost and time. Our Testing Services offer functional, non-functional, and test automation services to ensure your applications perform optimally. We combine our consulting and testing expertise with appropriate industry-specific testing solutions to address specialized requirements at your business’s core. Our Testing Services are a unique combination of traditional and the latest services spanning from QA of applications/software/systems to Testing under new-generation technologies and platforms.