Online retailers compete in a high-pressure and high-competitive environment. Along with providing a compelling shopping experience, you also need to make that experience fast and reliable. About half of all online shoppers say they will abandon a website if it takes more than 2 seconds to load it. Well-performed and well-designed website is key to eCommerce success. A typical user journey of online buyer starts from the homepage or searching for a product, adding product(s) to the shopping cart, filling the order details and payment details and placing the order. In this article, we cover important segments and test cases for eCommerce website testing.

Availability

Unavailability of the websites means losing revenue and it also may harm your reputation. Businesses need to provide 24/7 availability to their customers. Several things influence availability, such as hardware reliability, software reliability, the effectiveness of load balancing, and the database’s  ability to handle concurrent users. So before the website launch, you should consider usage patterns and indicate maximum stress levels.

Usability

Good website usability is huge for attracting customers and make them stay.  Usability is the ease with which a customer can perform a set of tasks, typically determined by the time taken for its completion. You can test usability through usability studies, in which you give a group of individuals selected tasks to carry out, observe their performance, and get feedback.

Backup / Recovery

Design systems the way that one component’s failure doesn’t bring down other components. Test both the speed and ease at which systems can recover from component failure; think of how you can restart the service and how quick and easy it is to perform and restore backups.

Session management

The system should be tested for several characteristics: session expiration, session storage. For example, session objects might be stored as cookies, but what if users don’t enable cookies? Are there any limitations to the physical size of objects?

Page Display

It covers all the important interface connecting customer and the business. Incorrect display of pages. There is the list of a common page displaying issues: Incorrect display of pages, Runtime error messages, Dead hyperlinks, Plug-in dependency, Font sizing, Poor page downloading time.

Shopping experience /  Purchasing

1) Homepage 

• Is banner auto scroll available? The interval for refreshing page?
• When the user hovers over it, is it still going to scroll to the next one?
• Is the banner clickable? is it taking to the right page?
• Is it loading along with the rest of the page or loads last in comparison to the other elements on the page?
• Does it render the same way in different browsers and different screen resolutions?

2) Search / Filtering

• Search based on the product name, brand name, category or any other details and attributes. Different sort of options has to be available. 
• How many results to display per page?
• For multi-page results are there any options to navigate to them?
• Is search available in many places? Please take the search drilling down into multiple levels into consideration when validating this functionality. 

3) Product Page

• Image or images of the product
• Price of the product
• Product specifications
• Reviews
• Delivery options
• Shipping information
• Multiple colour or variations options
• Breadcrumb navigation for the categories. If navigation such as that is displayed, make sure every element of it is functional.

4) Shopping Cart

• Add items to the cart and continue shopping
• If the user adds the same item to the cart while continuing to shop, the item count in the shopping cart should get incremented
• Is the total amount displayed in the cart?
• Are taxes per location applied?
• Update the contents added to the cart- total should reflect that too
• Remove items from the cart
• Calculate Shipping costs with different shipping options
• Apply coupons
• Don’t check out, close the site and come back later. The site should retain the items in the cart

5) Payments

• Check different payment options
• If allowing check out as a Guest, simply finish the purchase and provide an option to register at the end
• Returning customers – Login to check out
• If storing customer Credit card or any other financial information, perform security testing around this to make sure it is secure – PCI compliance 
• If the user is signed up for a long time, make sure the session is timed out.
• Emails/Text confirmation with the order number generated

At TMotions we offer a wide range of testing services for eCommerce. Check them out here https://www.tmotions.com/