Performance Testing of E-commerce Applications

October 07 08:33 2020 by Kate Libbie Print This Article

Since shopping moved largely online, the buyers of today have lots of options to choose from. The number of e-commerce applications is gaining traction, so does the competition on the market. To be ahead of the curve for the project owners, it’s time to think about quality, and performance testing, in particular, to ensure it. Today we will uncover its principle, and the right strategy to conduct it.

What Does Performance Testing Check

Time is money, and for e-commerce applications, the same holds true. Statistical data say, 40% of users abandon a site that takes to longer than three seconds to load. For those using a mobile website, 53% of users will leave the site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Be it a web page or a mobile application, speed and load are two major factors for application success in the e-commerce realm.

Performance testing, in turn, is a way to check whether an application performs to its optimum when the traffic is very high. This type of testing is conducted to evaluate how the site will perform under various loads, and identify all the weaknesses of the product. Apart from this, it is needed to check the speed during the processing and transmission of information and detect changes after adding updates to the site.

Strategy for Performance Testing

Performance testing for e-commerce websites can bring a lot of benefits. One of them is the opportunity to attract more customers and gain profits as well. But to make all that work, you need to know how to conduct performance testing correctly. One should take into account the below-mentioned factors:

#1 Verify the functionality. The first thing users will come into contact with is a user interface (UI). As a rule, it contains graphical elements and buttons which perform key functions of an app like search, add to cart function, payment gateways, and more. Performance testing should start with checking items like this. The main criteria for e-commerce applications are fast availability and the opportunity to point back to the sale page quickly again.

#2 Carry out load testing. The next step is about checking the behavior of an app under various working load. Different traffic can cause different reactions, and network or slow server speed is not an exception. To discover such bugs on time, it is necessary to simulate situations with thousands of simultaneous users. Things to keep an eye on at this stage: application peak time, response time, and traffic pattern.

#3 Check behavior on various devices. There can be many devices, their configurations – even more. A successful shopping experience should be possible in different environments. Thus, it is essential to conduct performance testing on other devices and reveal why and when runtime error messages crop up, whether pages are displaying correctly, etc.

#4 Test application in the cloud. The last but not least step is to check whether the e-commerce applications will function well in the clouds. For example, a user can make purchases on a mobile device, place an order from the desktop version, and do all that stuff in a cloud. To be sure that nothing will disappear, QA teams conduct cloud testing to ensure that the app is quick and reliable.

To make e-commerce applications work without any delay or complication, be sure your app had gone through all the checks mentioned above.

As always, if you require help with testing your project, don’t hesitate to contact us. Thanks for reading.