E-commerce applications-Testing

Introduction

When setting up an e-commerce Web site on the Internet, severe testing is vital to the implementation and maintenance of a consistent system that will create customer confidence.

Testing is essential to e-commerce because e-commerce sites are both business acute and extremely visible to their users; any let-down can be immediately expensive in terms of lost revenue and even more expensive in the longer term if dissatisfied users seek substitute sites.

Yet the time pressures in the e-commerce world militate against the thorough testing usually associated with business criticality, so a new methodology is needed to enable testing to be integrated into the development process and to ensure that testing does not present a noteworthy time burden.

“Best practices” are constantly challenging within the context of your product, customer base, domain, layout, web design and existing online shopping conditions.

The main objective of any e-commerce site is to encourage visitors to buy, so content and site structure needs to vigorously reflect that objective.

Areas to focus on e-commerce testing for delivery and presentation of content:

Following is a checklist of test areas that group together common types of testing usually smeared to e-commerce systems:

• Browser compatibility: Consumers will become unsatisfied if they can’t get to your e-commerce site easily. Though fairly simple to do, it pays to spend enough time testing in this area.

• Lack of support for early browsers: Not all browsers are like. For example, some primary versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator do not fully provision JavaScript. We should test our application in at-least all A class browsers.

• Browser tones: Even with the same release version, browsers act differently on different platforms, and when used with different language options. Testing ought to cover at least the chief platforms (UNIX, Windows, Mac, and Linux) and the expected language options.

• Page exhibition: The exhibition of pages in a browser forms the all-important interface between the buyer and the business. Get this wrong in any way, and the job of building customer confidence and trust becomes much more difficult.

• Incorrect display of pages: Exhibiting all pages correctly is not as easy as it sounds—most e-commerce systems produce Web pages dynamically rather than display static HTML. Problems can occur—for example, when the browser retrieves an empty result set from the database or when a database connection is unavailable. A page display might also involve loading properties (such as applets) beforehand, and you could meet problems when such properties are unavailable. Test that your system grips such exceptions appropriately.

• Runtime error messages: Consumers get frustrated when a browser throws up unanticipated error messages. Such error messages are generally unfriendly and not meaningful to users; moreover, they leave a poor impression on the consumer. Carry out tests to ensure that the application captures and handles all errors by, for example, generating an apt and user-friendly error page.

• Numb/Broken hyperlinks: Numb hyperlinks are a frequent cause of customer frustration; even the most popular portals suffer from hyperlinks that lead nowhere. Several automated tools now test hyperlinks like Xenu, LinkChecker etc.

            Also, there are Web sites that offer online testing for broken links at a nominal fee or/and free:

              http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/
              http://validator.w3.org/checklink
              http://www.iwebtool.com/broken_link_checker

• Poor page download times: A study estimates that page load times of 10 seconds or more combined with ISP download times could cause up to 33% of customers to leave a site beforehand buying anything. Pages that have a high graphical content and/or use applets, though beautifully pleasing, often download problematic. Test download time under genuine test conditions (that is, account for typical Internet traffic) rather than testing it locally.

• Transactions: Transaction processing is a dominant element of most e-commerce systems. With distributed systems, transaction processing can span several individual systems, leading to more complex testing.

• Transaction integrity:

              ·    Does the system appropriately perform all aspects of transaction processing? For example, does the system call the right database triggers and procedures?
              ·     Does it commit and roll back transactions acceptable?
              ·     Have system developers set the appropriate remoteness levels?
              ·     Devise a set of inputs that will attempt to create “nonstandard” transactions—for example, transactions with a zero quantity or value—as well as standard ones.

Safe transactions generate customer confidence. That’s because when customers purchase goods over the Internet, they can be worried about giving credit card information. Therefore, security measures should have conversed to the customer.

Two things required to be tested to guarantee that the customer’s credit card information is safe. First, testing must ensure that the credit card information is transmitted and stored securely. Second, testing must verify that strong encryption software is used to store the credit card information, and only limited, authorized access is allowed to this information.
For more information on secure electronic transactions, you can refer:

www.verisign.com
www.cybercash.com
www.checkfree.com

• Shopping, order processing, and purchasing:

My experience recommends that functional testing typically eats between 30% and 50% of the total testing effort. In most e-commerce systems, shopping/purchasing, and order processing forms the core functionality. Other functional areas can include customer profiling, discount and bargain management, automatic marketing, branding, and inventory management. Although most developers largely consider functional testing a manual process, tools (such as QTP, Selenium etc.) can often help automate aspects of functional testing by automatically capturing and re-running user interactions.


>> Shopping-cart functionality: Many e-commerce sites use shopping carts (or some variant of the same theme) as a mechanism for the customer to compile orders. Elementary shopping carts provide “list and total-up” functionality, whereas more urban ones can provide extra functionality, such as tax and shipping calculation, loyalty/promo discounts, and “save and recall” features for orders. Testing should cover all features of shopping-cart functionality based on test suites of shopping items.

>> Order processing: Order processing can involve the automated creation or update of transactions or the delivery of information to back-end systems.

>> Payment processing: Tactics to payment processing vary from the simple capture of credit card details for the offline period? Fake the peak situation and see how well the e-business procedure handles. In particular, observe where the main blockages are and where you can make the most value-added enhancements. Before going live, guarantee that you know at least the rough capacity of effective business procedures.

• Tax and shipping calculations: Entrepreneurs have to handle with multiple taxes and shipping rates. The problem becomes greater if the entrepreneur is supplying to customers outside the country. Some software provides ready-made solutions to both problems simultaneously. Software’s are upgraded whenever tax structures amendment occurs. However, the entrepreneur needs to frequently check with legal and tax consultants to keep track of tax and shipping rates. Improper tax and shipping levies on the client invariably result in losing clients to the competitors.

• Login and security: Security (or a lack of it) is a chief barrier to e-commerce. With the rise in credit card scam and high-profile hacker occurrences, clients increasingly avoid e-commerce sites and systems they notice as insecure.

• Login/Registration capability: Numerous probable problems can arise from failed login functionality. The most typical of such problems is a user providing a valid login and password but not being able to log in. Other problems can be more complex, such as when the system sets personalization settings incorrectly. Where appropriate, tests should also verify that the system correctly sets privilege levels.

But where should we initiate testing?

Here are few tips for what NOT to do, and what to do the minute commencement of your testing efforts.

• Don’t start with the home page. Exchanges don’t happen on the home page, and a large portion of your visits won’t even land on your home page. Relatively, test downstream in the conversion path (also known as checkout), because guests that get that far are more likely to convert than “anyone else in the world.” Twitch where the money is and work backward.

• Don’t start with your worst performing page. This is another saga that has gained the reputation. Yes, you want to improve your bad pages, but even if you get, say, a 10% lift – it’s a 10% lift in a low traffic or low-value page. “10% of almost nothing is still almost nothing.” If you pick a good performing page to optimize, the money shows up directly. It’s much more electrifying.

• Test your search result and category pages. These pages are often living in the shades of your fashionable home page, product pages, and checkout, but they’re key to getting guests to the product pages! Don’t forget about category pages, which are very alike if not equal to search pages for many sites.

• Choose pages with the most affluent traffic. If you’re spending top dollar to attract new guests to a product or category, you want to make the most of that spend by minimizing bounce rates and maximizing devoted purchases and cross-sell/upsell.

• Run tests on associated landing pages. Unlike paid search traffic, you typically don’t pay for visits referred by associates, but associates are more impressed by online merchants that test. You may even give them custom landing pages and allow your associates to provide some input, as they are chief marketers themselves.

• Test and test yet again: It is so important to test your website and service platform from the viewpoint of a client to ensure that everything runs appropriately. I can’t tell you how many businesses I run across that is highly evident that they do not do this.

Challenges of E-Commerce Testing

With fast changes in technology and improvement in hardware and software, the tester finds it hard to standardize tools or techniques for e-commerce testing. The following are some of the challenges of e-commerce testing:

• Fast change of technology in e-commerce: 

Fast change in e-commerce technologies keeps the developer and the tester on their toes. As newer hardware and software bring better functionality, their conditions for testing become diverse every time they change. This reasons the tester to have to create new environments each time.

• Wide-ranging customer profiles:

Site guests may vary from a beginning client to a sophisticated client. Therefore, the tester needs to pretend the actions of all kinds of customers to be sufficiently thorough in testing the e-commerce system. Mimicking the actions poses great challenges to the tester.
Variations in the business environment, especially in terms of tax, multi-location, delivery shipping costs, and dispatch should also be replicated.

• Creating a test environment for e-commerce:

Creating a test environment for e-commerce applications is hard because of the complexity of an e-commerce Web site and its interaction with the live world. There is interaction with credit card companies, fulfillment warehouses, and clients. Therefore, mimicking every possible action of the online customer is impossible because the tester cannot forecast the actions of the site visitor. Also, the tester is unaware of the traffic strength at peak times. Because the future of the site is unknown to the tester, the e-commerce Web site can be tested for certain standard functions but may not be tested for all contingencies.

• Testing security:

Hackers have no usual method of breaking into e-commerce sites, so there are no standard methods of security testing. Also, there are few tools available to test security aspects thoroughly.

Conclusion

Testing is the vital activity for e-commerce implementation. It ensures software consistency and system guarantee. Each element involved in an e-commerce system goes through severe testing. This testing ensures a dependable e-commerce site that creates customer confidence.
The different types of testing are content testing, database testing, server load, user acceptance testing, and security testing. E-commerce testing is typically a process of repetition. After the developer fixes errors and bugs in the e-commerce system, the tester has to retest the system for any abnormal behavior due to these fixes.

The most crucial aspect of e-commerce testing is the test environment. E-commerce testing is thought-provoking.