Test Automation in E-Commerce: All You Need to Know

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Did you know during 2020, more than two billion people shopped for products online? That is not the only surprising e-commerce stat to emerge from the ashes of the pandemic. In 2020, e-commerce retail sales shot past $4.2 trillion across the globe. Imagine — all this growth in a period marred by a global pandemic. Interestingly, this growth will continue unabated for the foreseeable future and that necessitates the adoption of modern tools such as test automation. Why? Well, because it brings forth terrific value for the sector and with it, a whole lot of intense competition to the market.

Today, automation testing for an e-commerce website is an effective method to test how the program functions in different scenarios and ultimately bring about practical solutions by running tests. The process involves writing and use of automation scripts to carry out the (usually) manual work for the QA to be sure nothing gets skipped due to boredom and other things while fast-tracking the release or reducing the time-to-market.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

The process of automation testing of the e-commerce website considers as a solid precautionary step to finding out malfunctions and bugs in the system before it is launched.

To help you better understand precisely what test automation’s role in the world of e-commerce is and the value testing automation brings to the table, we must first become acquainted with some of the key challenges that plague this sector.

  1. Collaboration: To successfully develop and run a top-notch e-commerce store, collaboration is an absolute must. This holds for test automation as well because without seamless communication amongst different teams automated testing too can fail to achieve its intended goals.
  2. Changing customer demands: The retail market is continually changing on account of growing competition and evolving customer demands. Keeping up with such changes requires regular updates to the store; cloud-based test automation can help ease the process.
  3. Constant updates: Even without updates to the software, an e-commerce store needs constant updates in the context of data, products, services, etc.

Time to check out test automation’s benefits and how it can help address e-commerce challenges:

  1. Poor user experiences can quickly take a toll on the business’ sales; hence, automation testing also helps improve sales and customer conversion rates by helping address issues that can affect buyers’ experiences with the website or app.
  2. With testing, companies can avoid extensive investments to fix issues because doing so after the e-commerce store has been launched is typically an expensive undertaking.

Here are some best practices to keep in mind:

  1. Adapt thinking process: Since e-commerce organizations typically involve highly distributed systems, it is advisable to either write straight to a database or post to a web service endpoint since doing so helps bypass the time-intensive process of setting up the test data.
  2. Use cloud-based solutions: Cloud-based automated testing not only facilitates quicker testing of various functionalities across different platforms and browsers but also provides improved visibility into real-time updates in the testing pipeline.
  3. Ensure data-driven testing: Testing teams must not only undertake repeat scenario testing but also use real user data to design different tests.

Finally, a quick look at the types of tests that can be automated for e-commerce:

  1. Functionality testing: This type of testing is meant to ensure that all features and functionalities, such as new menus, promo codes, etc., offered to end-users are working as intended.
  2. Performance testing: This test seeks to verify that the app or website can run seamlessly on all devices and that the store does not take too long to load.

As e-commerce companies contend against the growing competition in a continually evolving market, they need advanced solutions to gain an edge over their peers. Test automation is one such tool, as evidenced from the discussion above. Go on and start looking for a trusted test automation company to get started on automating your digital store’s testing processes as well.

Mrunal Chokshi
Mrunal has been actively involved in Internet marketing for more than 10 years. His knowledge and experience motivates him regularly in contributing through writing on technology topics.

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