How to Improve eStore Performance with QA

Over the course of the pandemic, eCommerce sales have been prevailing steadily and by 2024 will increase by $2.1 trillion in comparison to 2020.

Significantly enough, this boom is due to the rise in mCommerce. In 2021, the share of its global sales will skyrocket and comprise 72.9% of all eCommerce.

Thus, business owners are presumably confronting one of the most remarkable boosts in traffic recorded since 2019 (when websites generated 22 billion visits in the middle of 2020 as opposed to only 16 at the start, even exceeding holiday season peaks). It means that ensuring flawless customer experience comes to the fore, as due to pervasive digital transformation, the choice of eStores has never been greater.

With that in mind, how can market players successfully cope with the maximized load and make a profit сonsidering that the worldwide conversion rates constituted only 2.58% across diverse devices in 2020?

Answers lie in supplementing the software development strategy with independent performance testing to spot throughput bottlenecks and optimize website velocity.

Still doubt that speed matters the most today?

Performance concepts demonstrate your website’s ability to quickly load pages and correctly display their elements, which in the global context directly increases the chances of business prosperity.

Present-day users coddled by the overwhelming majority of apps can simply turn to your competitors rather than wait for a solution to download. It’s been proven by Google’s statistics ― more than half of mobile website users are reported to abandon a resource if it takes more than 3 seconds to open. But that’s only half the battle.

Several years ago, Google updated its algorithm in a way that resulted in only companies that optimized performance speed may count on high ranking positions within searches. Otherwise, the risk of potential traffic and customer loss multiplies. Additionally, sales rates feel the inevitable impact of velocity ― the latest Akamai research states that only a one-second delay in page loading speed causes a 7% scale decline in conversion. Convert this indicator into a missed opportunity and let the figures speak for themselves.

Thus, a boost in eCommerce website velocity should become a part and parcel of a business strategy for any company that strives not to get caught between a rock and a hard place.

When and how to improve eStore performance with QA?

The ability to place yourself in the customer’s shoes means everything when it comes to obtaining profits from your eStore. Thus, ensuring successful CX and enabling unhindered software operation under a high load should become a priority.

Especially during instances of steady business growth, before periods of record-breaking sales, and when introducing a mobile version of your solution.

Business need 1. Ensure flawless website operation considering stable business growth

An analysis case: a company is facing a boom in the number of clients and sales but still hesitates to migrate the website to another eCommerce platform able to support the increased needs. How to avoid a decline in productivity?

Special emphasis on the range of server and client-side performance verifications may be useful. Applied in complex, they help detect critical and major issues, optimize the page loading speed, and reduce server response time.

By choosing a user behavior method and carefully comparing the traffic from the browser of a real user with the network traffic generated by the load scripts, it’s possible to significantly increase the accuracy of the results that demonstrate the actual system throughput.

Running tests on both QA and production environments is of high importance (despite the obvious similarity, the latter still isn’t a replica).

An ideal approach is to create a production copy of the environment to avoid any errors. Impossible? Then conduct the testing process late at night not to impede customer activity, so an agile team able to adjust to these requirements is beneficial.

In addition, cloud-based performance testing helps decrease operational costs and boost scalability to simulate the required number of users without adding extra hardware resources as well as easily test from diverse geographical regions.

Business need 2. Handle Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic with no downtime

Each year, hundreds of thousands of online shoppers simultaneously purchase discounted goods.

To help the system withstand overload and make sure it will sustain the increased pressure for a specific period, companies can start with server-side testing focusing on the load.

What elements of an eCommerce website should organizations concentrate on to provide robust customer experience within high-traffic scenarios? It’s possible to clearly distinguish:

• Сore user flows including steps such as registration, login, shopping cart, checkout, and more
• Payment transactions fulfilled either by a proper payment system or a third-party gateway
• The generation of divergent tokens and cookies responsible for smooth customer journeys
• The management of inventories to keep product records up to date
• Back-end integrations like CRM or logistics.

Such an approach helps guarantee the high technical health of all the pivotal eCommerce transactions when the gradual workload increases.

Once the server-side code is optimized and response time (time to first byte) is reduced, the QA team proceeds with spotting any delays in a browser by client-side testing. It’s aimed at measuring the load and render time for web pages. It helps verify the correct web page layout and the location of key text elements, ensureing the full download of all functional components and graphics.

Finally, the sooner you start performance testing, the better. Identifying performance bottlenecks faster helps lower potential costs down the road and predict how extra load could create an impact on your system.

Business need 3. Increase eCommerce mobile app performance to extend current client base

Mobile app performance testing is unlike the one fulfilled for web products. Whereas in the case of desktops, the throughput of mobile apps depends on a range of factors ― from network conditions to the type of device.

Therefore, establishing an effective testing process, apart from fulfilling the client-side testing, the QA team should also check the quality of device, server, and network performance.

Within the device throughput, the speed of launching an app, hardware peculiarities, memory consumption, battery potential, and interference in the case of apps parallel running.

When it comes to server performance, it’s important to pay due attention to checking the response time of handling sent data and make sure the increasing number of API requests from an app due to rapid functionality growth doesn’t cause an overload.

As for network throughput, the QA team simulates diverse network types, for instance, 5G to improve the accuracy of testing results while ensuring that voluminous data packets are sent from a client to a server and in the reverse direction with no delays in speed.

What’s more, testing on real mobile items and wearables is the cornerstone of ensuring quality amid real-life conditions.

The bottom line

Global consumer behavior has changed since the onset of the pandemic affecting the further development of eCommerce.

Its steady growth forces business owners to direct their efforts toward reducing performance risks and ensuring stable product operation under a heavy load to provide a successful CX and outperform competitors.

To do so with confidence, companies can implement both server and client-side performance verifications without neglecting the importance of mobile versions to spot existing bottlenecks, boost solution speed, and retain the client base.