15 Mistakes in E-Commerce Platforms You Can Prevent with Software Testing

Quality becomes one of the main arguments for why customers would prefer your platform instead of a competitor’s. And quality is difficult to reach without proper testing.

Bugs can turn user experience into a nightmare. Some may forgive you for a broken link on some product page, but search issues, troubles with checkout, ordering, and payment affect online sales directly.

As a rule, comprehensive testing can prevent all of the mentioned problems. We have compiled a list of problematic areas in e-commerce platforms the product team should pay attention to before the release of an e-commerce site and during its exploitation.

E-Commerce Testing: Areas that Require Increased Attention

“There was a problem with your address submission. Please fix all the areas below and try again”. That’s how Amazon asked a user to solve an issue that wasn’t there. Walmart’s checkout process yielded errors for perfectly valid phone numbers. JCrew’s app had boxes covering the “continue” button and key information.

As you can see, even e-commerce giants have serious quality issues at some point. Software bugs like those are dangerous to e-commerce businesses. They don’t only annoy but make it complicated or impossible to buy something. That’s certainly a problem for an online shopping service.

If you are an e-commerce website owner, it would be useful to keep in mind the areas that require increased attention before a platform goes live. You can learn about some of the mistakes QA specialists frequently report during e-commerce website and application testing in this article.

Problems with Registration & Signing In

If you offer to register with an email or social media account, each of these options should work as supposed. At some point, users going through the registration process on Amazon received a notification, “This form is not secure. Are you sure you want to submit it?” at the final stage of registration. Such things seem suspicious for online shoppers, and not everyone will agree to finish the registration.

Now, a few words about existing users. If there are problems with signing in, which can occur as a part of regression, users won’t be able to proceed to purchase. Some will leave a website for now, and some will leave forever.

That’s why issues with getting started are among the most critical mistakes for e-commerce platforms. On the other hand, they are among the first to be detected in the e-commerce testing process.

Broken Layout

Layout bugs can be of different levels of severity. For example, a logo of low quality, wrong resolution, or out of place on the homepage can look bad. Your marketing team will insist on fixing it as soon as possible. This issue, however, doesn’t affect a website’s functionality at all.

Meanwhile, overlapping fields, problematic drop-down lists, input fields that don’t work, and similar problems can make it impossible to finish a purchase. If a contact form has an unclickable button, users cannot reach a seller/support, which is also problematic. During UI testing, a QA team detects all of these issues and sets the corresponding severity and priority levels.

Problems with Editing Account Data

There are several variations of this bug, in particular: impossible to edit data during checkout; impossible to save changes immediately, without moderation; problems with saving the changes. And unlike a broken layout, all of these scenarios are troublesome. Users should be able to change their phone numbers, addresses, and even names. Right, personal data can change, but the need for online shopping stays.

Search Algorithms (Slightly) Off

The most common issue with a website search is regarding indirect matches. While websites don’t usually have issues displaying direct queries, showing relevant indirect queries may be problematic. What kind of search features to check to prevent it?

• Search based on the category, product, and brand name. For example, customers should get the relevant results by typing in “Phone,” “Samsung Galaxy M51”, and “electronics.”
• Navigation option for multi-page results.
• Different options for sorting the products (price, brand, reviews, etc.).
• Autocomplete feature and the relevance of the suggestions.
• Autocomplete’s ability to work with misspellings.

Problems with Filters & Sorting

The top five e-commerce platforms on Google’s first page offer detailed filtering by multiple parameters. Meanwhile, the lack of filters can turn the search into a nightmare. If we see an error such as “filters can’t be applied,” it goes to a bug report or makes a ticket for a dev team.

The situation with sorting is similar. If you give users an option to view their search results based on popularity, price, novelty, etc. a list should adjust accordingly. And just like that, users should be able to change the sorting/filtering parameters or remove them.

Glitchy Cart, Basket, Bag

There are several ways to make this element on an e-commerce website. What’s common regardless of the naming is functionality. This is where items end up before a user pays for them. Users should be able to:

• Add items to a shopping cart.
• Remove items from a shopping cart.
• Change the number of items in a shopping cart.
• See the correct price they are to pay during checkout.

This is a basic set of features for an e-commerce site. If a cart on your site synchronizes between tabs or you want it to stay cached after a user leaves, specify it in the requirements. A QA team will check to see if it works as supposed.

Problems with Checkout

Ideally, a checkout page should feature order details, billing and shipping addresses, contact details, delivery method, and payment method on a single page. When it comes to functionality, it’s crucial to consider the following points:

• the checkout page loads and all the required fields are displayed;
• a user can enter text in fields that require data entry;
• fields are verified for certain data types: correct phone number, email, credit card number, etc.;
• the “edit” feature works properly and the user can change typed info;
• all the buttons are clickable;
• must-fill fields are marked;
• order placement is impossible with empty obligatory fields.

Problems with Payment Gateway

The payment gateway is the functionality that follows the cart. Bugs that can pop up at this stage include:

• poor integration with payment options;
• long payment processing;
• charging an incorrect amount;
• troubles with payment confirmation methods;
• unmapped or incorrect errors;
• absence of success message.

Payment gateway testing also covers refunds. Though usually refunds are based on a separate logic (leave a request, contact a provider, canceled orders, etc.), a store owner uses the same mechanism for transferring the costs.

A QA specialist can check the payment gateway as a part of end-to-end testing or separately, through the UI or API layer. The goal is to verify a customer can pay for an order or receive the refund in full and without problems.

Poor Integrations Between Functionalities

One of the examples of poor integration is problematic synchronization between a website and warehouse records. In this case, the items that are out of stock may remain available for purchase until updated manually. And it is equally annoying for customers and managers.

Integration bugs can also cause troubles with different extensions, tracking and analytics, calculations, and a bunch of other things. And to be honest, it is not surprising: bugs tend to pop up at the seams, where different parts of the system are merged. It reminds us once more about the importance of integration testing in e-commerce.

Security Concerns

Security is the foundation of a successful e-сommerce business. Reliable and safe interaction between clients and retailers works for your brand’s reputation. Data leaks, DDoS attacks, and other security issues are what ruins it. So, the aim is to maintain high security standards for your e-commerce website. How do you achieve that?

• Choose a secure web host and get an SSL certificate.
• Perform SQL checks, updating the website from time to time.
• Hire experts for data processing.
• Use the e-commerce website application firewall.
• Run penetration testing and security audit.

Slow Performance

The classic “three seconds rule” is known to be the limit of patience of an average user. It works for e-commerce websites as well. All the endeavors toward product development go in vain if the loading speed of the page is slow. This leads to a drop in traffic, an increase in bounce rate, a negative impact on SEO performance, and a loss of customers in the long run.

Besides slow loading, another common problem is an inability to withstand intense traffic, which happens during large promo campaigns and sales. E-commerce performance testing can help solve this issue.

Out-of-Place Popup Elements

Popup elements can be a way to attract attention, show relevant offers, inform about promo, and so on. However, if popups are difficult to close or overlap with other layout elements, they become annoying. In the worst case, these elements are impossible to close, and a user cannot proceed to the next page. It would be too bad to let a popup interfere with user experience and affect your sales. Thus, QA specialists always include this point in an e-commerce testing process.

Lack of Cross-Platform Support

With the share of mobile traffic increasing globally, new gadgets coming out, and browsers getting updates, it is necessary to ensure that users with different devices will be able to shop at your store or marketplace.

It is important to consider the variety of device/OS/browser combinations during both e-commerce mobile app testing and e-commerce website testing. There are a couple of reasons for that:

• to ensure consistent functioning across devices;
• to find layout bugs that are specific to a particular browser or OS;
• to check how a platform behaves on real devices.

Problems with Navigation

Navigation is one of the components of an e-commerce platform that deserves an entire article. In brief, the frequently found bugs include:

• Breadcrumbs that don’t feature all hierarchy elements.
• Unclickable breadcrumbs or some of their elements.
• No “Back” button or an obvious way to return to a previous page.
• Glitchy hover-based dropdown menus in a web version.
• Bulky menus that are difficult to work with in a mobile web view.

These are only some of the examples. In practice, troubles with website navigation can become a headache for users. And as you know, customers prefer online stores that offer a good selection of items, convenient payment and delivery options, and are convenient to use – right, all at once.

UX & Content Issues

QA engineers can share some recommendations on how to improve user experience. In particular, they can detect gaps in logic, help optimize user flows, and point out parts that are difficult for users to understand. If you want deeper UX research, however, it is better to engage a designer or a business analyst.

Long story short, UX improvements can contribute to an increase in customer satisfaction and overall sales, but specify your request when discussing the scope of tasks with a QA company. Make sure they run full-scale UX testing if you need one.

It is a similar situation with content issues: QA engineers can log some obvious issues, but they don’t usually check site content fundamentally (unless it is localization testing). Content bugs include, among other things, incomplete product descriptions, mistakes in product specifications, images in low resolution, and grammar errors.

To Sum Up

These are some of the mistakes QA engineers frequently find during e-commerce testing. Bugs can pop up in the most unexpected places. The good news is that you can detect them early with software testing. So if you are about to launch an e-commerce platform, don’t forget about proper testing. You can rely on in-house resources for the rest of the project tasks, but leave QA for a professional team.