Every year, we welcome the upcoming crazy, hectic holiday shopping season: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas. While many look forward to the holiday aesthetic decorations, others dread the long waiting queue at the checkout line or traveling through different stores to get the sold-out items as special gifts for their loved ones. That’s why eCommerce websites have been the stable shopping tools for the last 5 years, ever since the pandemic. Deloitte had forecasted the holiday sales to hit over $1.58 trillion from November 2024 to January 2025. Therefore, businesses are thoroughly prepping their websites to prepare for this special occasion.

Are you an eCommerce website owner? Have you done your eCommerce testing check-up this year yet? If not, jump in with us and tick these tests off your list now.

Performance Testing

1. Loading Test

As much as we would like to sugarcoat holiday shopping, it’s busy and chaotic, filled with frustrated consumers who selfishly want to purchase their gifts as fast as possible. Although your consumers won’t be visiting one at a time or casually surfing through your website, chances are they might all be visiting during a certain hour, leading to a spike in traffic. If your website cannot handle this particular surge and crash, most likely, your customers won’t come back to give you another try; they’ll be quickly moving on to another eCommerce site and shop there. Statistics from a recent ThinkwithGoogle 2024 survey indicate the probability of a bounce rate increase of 123% if your website page load time goes from 1s to 10s.

That means you’ll have to guarantee your site passed the loading test.

We didn’t want to bore you with the details regarding “What is Load Testing? Overview, Tools & Best Practices” in our recent post, so check it out for more in-depth information. We are basically testing load by simulating normal and peak traffic to evaluate how your website performs under these circumstances.

It’s best to reference the traffic patterns in the last few years to identify peak periods. If you don’t have such data, start simulating the scenario with various traffic loads: 100 visitors, 1.000 visitors, 10.000 visitors, etc.). Measure your page load times, server response times, error rates (the amounts of timeouts, error message show up), keep track of your resource usage including CPU, memory, bandwidth. Determine the acceptance range of these data. Make changes and modifications to your sites accordingly until they pass the test.

2. Stress Testing

Also, bring your website to meet its breaking point with stress testing in order to know under which extreme traffic conditions your server infrastructure is going to give in and crash, how your website is going to behave under unexpected surges, would it slow down then stop completely or just suddenly fail? This helps to establish exact server crash points, maximum user capacity before failing, the response time, and error rates that might occur at the highest load.

3. Scalability Testing

During high-demand periods, scalability testing aids in evaluating whether or not your website can scale up or down in response to the current state of traffic conditions. How is it different from the two above tests? In scalability testing, you can monitor how your system infrastructure allocates resource consumption to maintain a stable website performance. In short, it helps to be prepared when your website enters high load mode by backing up and adding more servers or resources accordingly. Your user experience consistency would be guaranteed with no downtime without encountering error rates. If physical servers cost you, look into cloud-based server solutions. It’s convenient and budget-friendly in the long term.

Functional Test

Ultimately, having more functionalities and features on your eCommerce website aims to attract and convert your customers. That’s true only if those functions and features are operating correctly. With the overwhelming traffic coming into your site at once, everything might go sideways from there; double-check on the key functionality is never excessive, especially in these areas:

Shopping cart

Start with adding and removing products/from your cart, modify product quantities, and observe whether the product price is updated or not. Is your shopping cart visible enough for your customer to access any page throughout their shopping journey? Does your product price support multiple currencies? Are there any errors while switching currency units? Do you support the user login interface? If yes, does your cart persist after the users log in or out?

These scenarios should be tested to prevent any broken cart experience for your customers. There is nothing more annoying than not being able to get your order checked out properly. It’s only a few clicks away from topping up your revenues, such a loss in sales at this very stage.

Product search and filter

Searching and filtering out products according to desired criteria allows customers to acquire products faster, shortening their browsing time. However, the product search bar and filtering system often perform poorly, resulting in their customers abandoning their shopping cart while confronting frustration.

Check for search accuracy to eliminate irrelevant products showing up and empty results while having valid queries. Look into search suggestions and auto-completion to offer an extra user-friendly search experience. Verify that your pagination or infinite scroll works properly for multiple search result pages.

Payment and Order Processing

As you approach the end of your eCommerce customer journey, an error-free, smooth checkout process is essential to convert your customers and keep them coming back for the next shopping session, increasing customer retention.

First, put all payment methods and options you provide to the test (credit card, debit card, Paypal, eWallet, American Express, etc.) to ensure they proceed adequately. Second, don’t forget to aggressively test any promo codes or discounts offered for this particular season! People quickly get extra heated about the free discounts they have been excited about, but it did not work. Last but not least, the shipping options and calculators are equally important. Make sure it does not miscalculate domestic and international shipping if you offer it. Once the shipping cost is triple the price of an item, it’s difficult for any customer to justify the order and why they should proceed to purchase with that type of shipping fee.

Usability testing

Suppose functional testing focuses on the nature of website features and functionalities. In that case, usability testing examines the website’s overall user experience (UX), aiming to keep your website intuitive and make it easy to interact with customers. For instance, usability testing would be used to test whether or not your customers can find or locate holiday-related deals quickly and proceed with their orders without any confusion. Functionality testing would verify whether the holiday promo codes shipping calculator has been manipulated correctly, how the search bar returns accurate results based on the holiday-related input keywords, etc.

Basically, usability testing is here to:

1. Spotting out your customers’ challenge

The usability testing approach facilitates uncovering any obstacles and issues that actual users might face while navigating an eCommerce website or product. Navigation barriers include the struggle to find a specific category or product either through an insufficient menu structure or a nowhere-to-be-seen search bar, a lengthy search process with too many checkboxes to narrow down the search but giving an overwhelming data input time, and unclear product descriptions.

This also applies to mobile experiences. Ensure your customer experiences are fine-tuned from desktop interface to mobile devices, as most customers shop on mobile devices. According to a recent study, up to 66.2% of the global population is shopping on cell phones. That’s a total of 5.35 billion people, a massive market to yield. Therefore, you should prioritize touch navigation, mobile payment options, and small-screen responsiveness for the test. People tend to do their shopping in their free time, like their boring commuting time to work, before bedtime, or after finishing their lunch and dinner. Mostly, you’ll find them surfing through their mobile devices. Take the mobile game seriously before it’s too late.

2. Accessibility and Customer Confidence

Stay mutual for the unlucky group of people who were born with short—or long-term impairments. Make your eCommerce website or product compliant with disability website standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Accessibility testing, a kind of usability testing, can assist you in achieving this.

Apart from the accessibility side of things, usability testing of all the visual elements, such as trust badges, return policies/ guarantees, shipping information, and easy-to-access communication buttons (phones, emails, or live chats), helps build customer confidence. Non-working visual badges often worsen your eCommerce website or product brand reputation.

3. Taking the A/B Testing advantages

Many are afraid to do things differently during the holiday season because they fear losing sales figures. This thinking mechanism prevents eCommerce businesses from thriving further from their safety zone. Start conducting your holiday promotions, banners, and different types of CTA and measure their effectiveness. Adjust the feedback daily to maximize the conversion rate.

Security Testing

Protecting your customers from payment fraud is the number one goal in security testing. With increased sales during this period comes a higher risk of being targeted by cyber attackers. Watch out for:

1. Vulnerability Scanning:

Performing regular vulnerability scans to detect any vulnerabilities within your eCommerce website or products, including 3rd party integrations such as outdated certifications, software, and plugins. Patch any security loopholes existing in your SSL injections, XSS, or CSRF.

2. Securing Authentication Processes and User Data

Simulate cyber attacks to test the password strength requirements. Carry out penetration testing to identify any risk exposures to customer data storage and retrieval. Test multi-factor authentication (if you offer it) to make sure it works seamlessly. Verify session management to monitor how cookies and tokens are handled appropriately after an expired session. All these are to strengthen customer data security and prevent unauthorized access.

3. Payment fraud

Remember that your payment system must comply with regulations like GDPR, CCPA, or PCI-DSS to avoid legal financial penalties. Regular review of compliance protection laws and industry payment standards updates must be made quarterly. Validating the encryption mechanism of sensitive payment data, 3rd party payment gateway. Conducting fraudulent transactions and suspicious activities to determine the fraud detection system response to such circumstances to adapt modification where fit.

4. DDoS Protection

A high volume of traffic coming to your eCommerce website can expose it to denial-of-service attacks, which can lead to downtime and temporary revenue loss. The best practice is simulating DDoS attacks and testing intrusion detection systems (IDS) to evaluate the effectiveness of your existing mitigation systems, such as CDNs, cloud-based firewalls, etc.

Expect the Unexpected

Always do the backup!

“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” – The Murphy law that we are all familiar with has once stated. Therefore, never skip a backup day and recovery procedures for data breaches and system failures. Better be safe than sorry! Have your server backups, alternative payment processors, backup 3rd party integrations, and immediate roll-back in case of last-minute instability, power outages, etc.

Scalable Infrastructure

As we mentioned earlier in Scalability testing under Performance Testing, in avoiding any downtime, corruptions due to drastic surges in traffic can overload your servers, causing crashes and making you lose sales. Optimizing your website by compressing images and videos, enabling caches, and using CDN when possible. Seeking extra boost from cloud hosting services that support auto-scaling during traffic spikes. The only tactic we have is to keep your eCommerce website operating in all due circumstances without any interruptions.

Customer support establishment

Implement chatbot and AI support to handle common repetitive customer questions while your support team can help with more complex issues and track errors for the development team to fix. Extend the customer support hour to prevent cart abandonment. We offer visible help signs at any purchasing stage. Test the live chat system to determine whether or not the chat queries were routed to the correct support channels. Validating feedback forms and multiple reviews under heavy load.

The holiday season is the gifting season. Forecasting bulk purchase customers’ behavior that will send out orders to multiple addresses. Build a unique customer workflow that will enable them to make their simultaneous purchases smoothly.

How Can SHIFT ASIA Help?

Preparing your eCommerce website for the bustling holiday season can be a monumental task. SHIFT ASIA, as a leading quality assurance and software testing provider, offers tailored solutions to meet the rigorous demands of holiday eCommerce readiness. Here’s how we can help:

Comprehensive Test Case Design:

Using SHIFT ASIA’s proprietary methodology, we cover over 900 viewpoints to ensure maximum test coverage. This exhaustive approach guarantees that your website is meticulously tested for every possible scenario, minimizing risks and optimizing performance.

QA Engineers and Experts in eCommerce:

Our team consists of professional QA engineers and domain experts with extensive experience in the eCommerce industry. They bring invaluable insights and best practices to tackle unique challenges and enhance your platform’s functionality and reliability.

Excellent Project Management:

With SHIFT ASIA, your testing projects are in capable hands. Our expert project managers streamline the process, ensuring timely delivery, clear communication, and alignment with your business objectives.

End-to-End Support:

From planning and test execution to monitoring post-launch performance, SHIFT ASIA provides end-to-end support for your eCommerce platform. We act as your trusted partner to deliver a seamless and stress-free testing experience.

Partner with SHIFT ASIA to alleviate the stress of eCommerce testing. Our tailored approach guarantees your website is ready for the holiday rush and prepared to deliver a seamless shopping experience that builds trust and loyalty.

The recap

The primary objective in eCommerce Testing before the holiday season is to ensure your customers follow through on an intended holiday customer journey and maximize the conversion rate as much as possible. Reinforce comprehensive, consistent testing to maintain a seamless user experience and exceed customer expectations. It’s time to reposition your brand reliability and build customer loyalty that drives revenue even after the holiday season ends.

Tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, Load Runner, BrowserStack, OpenVAS, Crazy Egg, etc., can assist you in these eCommerce tests. If you are running a tight deadline, seek out a third-party vendor for help. SHIFT ASIA stands ready to support your eCommerce goals and ensure a hassle-free holiday season for your business. Contact our support team for a private consultation.