How can the ecommerce sector adopt new technologies with Digital Assurance and Testing?

Digital technologies have allowed customers as well as enterprises to benefit in a big way. For customers, these have brought about convenience, speed, cost savings, and the ability to provide instant feedback. While for businesses, the outcomes are measured in terms of user experience, brand promotion, efficient workflows, increased productivity and profitability. Among the many domains where digitization has a transformative impact, ecommerce or digital commerce arguably lies at the top. The growing popularity of online stores comprising attractive and seamless shopping interfaces has led many of the brick and mortar stores to close shop.

To meet the challenges of a growing eCommerce segment such as building responsive applications, augmenting security and feedback mechanisms, and facilitating seamless customer interactions, enterprises have to adopt the right technology. Moreover, since security has acquired a new dimension with the growing number of cybersecurity challenges, digital assurance testing has acquired increased salience. In fact, driving better user experience through seamless navigation, attractive layouts and features, rich functionalities, and robust security measures forms the core objectives of businesses. Digital quality assurance in eCommerce helps in establishing brand equity and boost profitability.

Before delving into the details of how eCommerce can adopt new technologies with digital assurance testing, let us first understand the type of challenges the sector faces.

• Use of numerous third party modules related to payment and other functions.
• Presence of vulnerabilities leading to security breaches with payments gateways and user accounts.
• Striking a balance between attractive graphics and page load speed.
• Designers resorting to frequent changes in layouts or features.
• Frequent changes (additions, deletions, modifications) related to products and their menus.
• Compatibility of eCommerce site with various touchpoints – devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks.
• Cloud integration to store the database on products and users.

Ecommerce QA testing helps to overcome the above mentioned challenges covering multiple areas such as A/B testing, database, functionalities, usability, performance, security, and mobile responsiveness. The dynamic nature of eCommerce sites with frequent additions/deletions/modifications of products and design changes may lead to glitches spilling through and impacting the user experience negatively. To arrest such a possibility and ensure the users derive a seamless navigation, eCommerce software testing assumes significance. Ideally, the testers should follow the users’ journey and critically test the most visited areas and used features such as the home page, search filters, add to cart, payment gateways, and checkout.

New technologies or paradigms to be adopted by digital assurance testing

To enhance the user experience, eCommerce applications need to adopt innovative technologies and platforms such as Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet of Things. It is only through a robust eCommerce quality assurance exercise that a proper integration of the above mentioned technologies and platforms can be achieved and business value delivered.

• Cloud integration: The dynamic nature of an eCommerce website or application requires it to be scalable while possessing high page load speeds. Achieving these using in-house hardware systems may not be enough. This is where cloud based integration can achieve scalability and deliver the much needed digital experience to the users. However, cloud based integration should be tested for security, compatibility, agility, and performance.
• DevSecOps: Cybersecurity threat is a growing phenomenon faced by each and every enterprise operating in the digital ecosystem. However, its dimension enveloping eCommerce applications is particularly worrying given the latter’s interfacing with bank accounts, credit/debit cards, and digital wallets. This calls for creating a total security culture at all levels – development, testing, delivery and operations. The emphasis on security in the DevOps mould helps glitches, bugs, or malware to be identified and dealt with promptly in the SDLC and beyond.
• Test automation: The complexity of building and running an eCommerce application across device, platform, and network configurations necessitate the use of test automation. This aids in accelerating the build and test cycle, bringing efficiency, and reducing the effort of testers.
• Predictive analysis: As evident from the name, predictive analytics tools can be used to predict the challenges to be faced by eCommerce applications, be it in terms of user acceptability or failures. By analyzing the dashboard reports generated by the tools,

QA testing experts can look into the possibility of flaws in the application and take proactive decisions.

Conclusion

Running digital QA testing for eCommerce applications can help in saving time, effort, and cost, be it while developing the application or when the application is in use. This leads to the generation of good user experience and helps achieve ROI for the enterprise.

Diya works for Cigniti Technologies, Global Leaders in Independent Software Testing Services Company to be appraised at Cmmi-Svc v1.3, Maturity Level 5, and is also Iso 9001:2015 & Iso 27001:2013 certified.