Ecommerce testing is defined as testing of an Ecommerce or online shopping application. It is a very important process and it helps in the prevention of errors in the ecommerce website and adds value to the product by ensuring conformity to client requirements. The main objective of ecommerce testing is to ensure: -

• Software Reliability
• Software Quality
• System Assurance
• Optimum Performance and capacity utilization

Going for Ecommerce Development and setting up an E-Commerce website solution is a complex process and depends on many market-specific variables. Hence to maintain the integrity of the Ecommerce system, testing becomes very important.
 
It is important to test ecommerce websites so that it don’t have any issue regarding various crucial factors like mobile responsiveness, user experience, quick load time, customer data security and secure transactions. Also, the ultimate success of your ecommerce website depends on proper functioning of these factors and there should be no bug in your website whatsoever if you really want to provide a nice and amazing user experience to your customers.

Proper Testing is Crucial for the Success of Your Ecommerce Website
Most of the Ecommerce applications have so many users worldwide as they deal with retail & wholesale, finance, marketing, manufacturing and auctions. Global Ecommerce industry is witnessing an unprecedented growth for the past few years and it is estimated that it will be several Trillion dollars in next few years. Companies should give more focus on testing of their ecommerce websites and make it an essential part of their future ecommerce application development. All ecommerce sites which were launched didn’t taste success and one of the main reason behind their failure was not doing their proper testing.  
The main reasons for testing your ECommerce solution or ecommerce application is to check its usability, its user-friendliness, and to make your ecommerce website error free. You have to maintain the quality assurance standards to show your commitment to deliver quality ecommerce products to your customers. In this article we are going to look at effective ways of doing ecommerce website testing so that you can serve your customers in best possible ways.

Reasons Why We Test Ecommerce Websites
If you don’t test your Ecommerce website properly then that means that your business data is also at risk. The best Ecommerce development companies while building your application also make sure that your website is tested properly for any vulnerabilities or exploits. In other words, the level of business success you gain is highly dependent on making sure that your ecommerce platform is safe, secure and bug free.  Online retail is growing fast and worldwide ecommerce sales has already reached $ 2.5 Trillion in 2018.

Businesses need reliable platforms such as built using Magento Development to handle this kind of growth but if ecommerce solution is not tested properly and if it fails then it will be very costly for the company. For example, if Amazon ecommerce website doesn’t work even for a single second then that means losses of several millions. Good thing is that all of the issues related to ecommerce site failures can be avoided or significantly reduced with proper and timely testing. Hence the main objective of testing an ecommerce website are: -

• To check and inspect functionality.
• To find out how use friendly it is.
• To correct any bugs.
• To find out and remove any security vulnerability.

Know What You Need to Test While Testing Your Ecommerce Website: -
Proper ecommerce solution testing requires adequate experience, knowledge and effective planning. Let’s now discuss about the things you need to test during this phase.

• SEO-Friendliness:   Search engine optimization or SEO is mostly not given much of the importance by the Ecommerce website developers as may be they don’t understand it well. But you have to now understand and accept the fact that search engines are the number one source of organic or free website traffic on the internet. Social media comes after search engines. What this means is that your Ecommerce application needs to be SEO friendly and has settings done for the inbuilt SEO features. Hence you should facilitate the use of advanced techniques which can improve the performance of your webpages on Search engine result pages.
• User Interface Functionality and Workflow:    The important features related to customer experience should be tested for proper functionality. This means testing all the core areas of your website which a visitor or customer would interact with.  These include landing pages, catalog and its categories, shopping cart and payment gateways. Generally, ecommerce platforms are customized as per the requirements of the businesses hence website layouts may vary. Still in most cases, your main pages would include the homepage, search page, login, product, item or product description, order form, purchase confirmation and more.
  Testing will make sure that the important functions of your UI is working properly. Things like font size, topography, color, wish list, sorting and filtering should also be tested properly. Product categorization is very helpful for customers as it allows them to pick what they are looking for quickly. This should be very intuitive and simple to understand. Also make sure that the zoom option for images on the Ecommerce product page is working perfectly. Hence you have to check all the features and options on your ecommerce website.
• Mobile Responsiveness:   Now we all know that internet browsing through mobile is dominating and increasing at a rapid rate. More than 60% of the people access the internet through their smartphones now. That’s why a mobile first approach is recommended when building an Ecommerce website. It is highly important that you test the responsiveness of your website on all applicable and available screen sizes and resolutions like tablets, smartphones, iPhones and more. If you have developed a different version of your ecommerce site for the mobile users, then you need to test that too. For that you need to make your mobile site testing also a priority in your testing plans.
• Payment Processing:   You should do complete and thorough testing of your Payment Gateways to make sure no customer faces issues related to payments. Just think of a situation when a user is trying to make the payment but he is unable to proceed. Ecommerce website can say that it is because of the users’ cards but the credit card company is not agreeing on this. That means the business is not accepting that there is some problem within its ecommerce platform. Such situation can happen in an Ecommerce website until the business realizes that the real problem in the payment processing of the ecommerce website mean the Payment Gateways. That’s why if you don’t want to frustrate and disappoint your customers then run multiple tests on your payment gateways to ensure that your website is accepting and processing payments via all the options given on the site.
• Browser Compatibility:   It is very important to test your Ecommerce website on all the web browsers available in the market. This is because people use different web browsers like Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Firefox etc. Although all of these web browsers work in similar ways but they differ slightly in how they will display your website. Hence it is better to go through browser checks at all levels and save yourself from the problems which generally arise from incompatibility of web browser issues.

Conclusion
We have just discussed how much important is the testing of your Ecommerce website before it is being launched and before it reaches at the hands of the customers in the market. Such type of Ecommerce testing will help you to find errors or potential dangers before launching your ecommerce site publicly. Customers will like you for taking these kind of steps which ensure customer satisfaction, security and privacy when they are interacting with your website. Testing will remove the chances of glitches and security breaches and will ultimately bring reliability, credibility and profitability to your business.