A Beginners Guide To eCommerce Testing

Nowadays, software testing is one of the most important procedures for eCommerce companies. In eCommerce websites, we have important customers whom we don’t want to lose. It’s very important to keep these customers happy, so they’ll come back later and purchase more products.  Besides prices, there are many other things that are important for your customers. Aside from marketing and development, you need to maintain a well-tested store. Experiencing errors or 404s while browsing your site makes your customers lose trust in your brand and will drive them towards your competitors.
While testing as an eCommerce software tester, you need to pay attention to the following:
The user experience of the website, so users will feel comfortable and will not get lost while browsing your website. Seeing the website from the eyes of the customer will help the tester to find scenarios that will slow down the speed while navigating, getting lost, or having trouble finding what he or she is looking for.
The checkout process is the most important part of an online shopping experience. It should work without any issues and should include as few steps as possible. In terms of things going on underneath the hood during checkout, it’s hard to do effective manual checks for integrations, so we should make sure to have automated checks for integrations. Make sure to test not only placing orders and completing checkout processes, but also test and verify that the order has been correctly placed with the right totals, and is visible in the admin section.
Canceling and refunding orders are very common for customers and this feature should be tested very carefully. Each company has its own refund policy and as a software tester, you cannot just check if processing a refund is possible. It’s very important to check if the refund went through the payment gateway correctly and all order and refund statuses are correct.
Mail sending is a crucial functionality for online stores. Many companies are using integrated mail systems and mail sending should be checked very carefully, including spam checks. It’s good practice to have automated tests for mail sending too. As we deal with payment information of users, testers should make sure that test emails do not reach the company’s real customers.
Marketing tools are part of every website now and companies are using many marketing tools to get as much information about customers and their behavior in their website as they can. Usually, these kinds of tools are written using JavaScript and firing events based on customers’ actions. Without communicating with the marketing team, testers should not proceed to test marketing integrations. It’s important to know what events are in the website and what information they are firing with events. Whenever possible, testers should have access to the back end of the marketing platforms, so they can see the results of their tests and verify that test data is not ending up in the production accounts for these systems.
Coupons in eCommerce stores are very important for marketing and conversions. Some eCommerce sites even partner with couponing websites that publish coupon codes for them. Testers need to pay attention to coupon conditions and be sure that coupons are working only under those conditions. There are usually many test cases that need to be built to do proper testing, so QA needs to be very detailed here.
Each store has its specific features implemented and all need to be tested. When a store is tested and working as expected, it’ll help the business to grow. Test your products, and have an awesome day!