According to “Mobile eCommerce Stats in 2017 and the Future” eCommerce dollars now comprise 10% of all retail revenue and 62% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device in the last 6 months.

eCommerce is not limited to a website anymore. Your online business has to be multiple devices friendly to reach the customers conveniently through their gadget of choice (tab, mobile, laptop). With an estimated 10 Billion Mobile Connected Devices currently in use you need to build a website/app that is intuitive, flexible, and user friendly across all devices.

To make this an error-free reality, you need to rely on effective multi-device testing.

Emerging mobile market

Customers are spoilt for choice of shopping online through different browser, devices and operating systems to access different retail portals for faster, smoother purchase journey. Neat and user friendly websites are the ones which are reliable, secure and popular.  It has been extremely difficult for retailers to cater to the fact that each system processes HTML and JavaScript differently; making it difficult to address the variables rendering across to be intact. With this phenomenal growth of smart phones, tablets, browsers and operating systems applications require regular updates, making testing and QA more critical than ever before.

Challenges in the Multi-Device Testing

  1. Too many devices, too many tests. Time-consuming effort to get the right results across all devices.
  2. Frequent releases and dynamic design changes has been a constant challenge for testers to certify the e-commerce website/App.
  3. Mobile device fragmentation has become a problem area for testers/software developers to make sure that the application works as per requirement across various versions in a given OS.
  4. The diversity of applications with different capabilities has made testing quite a challenge for multi-devices operating in multiple platforms. Apparently, test cycle grows with every device, every software update, and every operating system which requires a vigorous application testing approach to meet the quality and performance of the application across devices.

Effective Multi-Device Testing

It is very time-consuming to run cross-compatibility tests on every single page. However, important e-com pages such as product pages, category pages, home pages need special attention if you want to ensure higher conversions. Device emulators can be one of the most cost-effective solutions to overcome this challenge. They provide excellent options for network bypass, a pseudo-live environment, and test scripting languages. Using only emulators would limit the test on real-life scenarios making the use of real devices imperative. The right mix of real physical devices and emulators would be the right approach towards cross-device testing to have a quicker and the better results.

Another vital area to test e-commerce applications would be its performance and security. Users are worried with the performance of application degrading as the size of cache increase and also skeptical about important credential information be vulnerable to hackers. So testing the load of the application with server side component by increasing the number of users is quintessential. Validating the application to encrypt username and password over the network would prevent any breach of important user information.

The Manual – Automated testing blend

Automation testing comes in handy while testing regression suite across all devices, browsers and OS combinations. It’s advised to include in your application testing strategy both manual and automation testing to keep the application intact. Manual checks are important and cannot be eliminated since there would be scenarios which would not be performed by emulators needing manual intervention. Automation is useful when scale and frequency of regression testing is very high and we cover basic functionality across different browsers/device combination.

Retail is a real-time competitive market where new features, frequent releases, and quality of the product need to be intact across multiple platforms. Having a QA partner with an appropriate plan for multi-device testing will help ensure consistency across devices/browsers. This wouldn’t be possible without a QA partner with experience and expertise in various areas of testing. Having worked with multiple Fortune 500 companies Aspire has empowered their customers with greater automation capabilities for seamless scaling of their applications for the future in both Mobile and Web applications.