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eCommerce stores are becoming more and more popular every day. Lots of people prefer to stay at home, away from everything, and shop online. Although it’s much more convenient for customers, it puts more pressure on eCommerce online store owners as they need to improve their website and pages to respond to the market changes. eCommerce testing helps you keep your website well-performed and updated. If you like to know more, keep reading!
With WatchThemLive’s session replays, you can find your eCommerce website’s bugs and see exactly where your customers are having difficulties. Sign up for FREE and get started.
What Is eCommerce Testing?
There are different factors that help you make a successful eCommerce store. One of them is eCommerce testing, which evaluates different eCommerce elements such as functionalities, pages, content, transactions, and overall performance.
eCommerce testing, when done right, will make more people visit your website and enable you to increase conversions. Through this process, tracking eCommerce metrics will help you improve your testing strategy.
Types of eCommerce Websites
First, we should know the eCommerce website types. eCommerce websites are divided into five groups based on the type of buyer and seller. Let’s go through them together:
1. Business to Business (B2B)
B2B is the process of buying and selling between two businesses. The constructor provides services or products for the retailer through an online route. You may have heard of Alibaba. It’s a good example of a B2B eCommerce website that connects buyers with sellers.
2. Business to Customer (B2C)
B2C eCommerce is exactly those online shops that we as individuals buy products from. They are online shops selling their products directly to customers. Simply, it’s the transaction between a business owner and a customer. A very clear example is Amazon. Amazon is a platform that provides any kind of product for its customers.
3. Customer to Business (C2B)
C2B is the reverse of the B2C model. It’s when a person sells their product or service to business owners. For example, an individual makes accessories and sells them to big businesses to make money.
4. Customer to Customer (C2C)
C2C is the kind of business that directly takes place between two individuals. A good example is a platform like “eBay” which lets people search for what they want and connect with each other.
5. ConsumertoAdministration (C2A)
C2A is about the transaction between individuals and public administrations. An example of this model is when you book airline tickets.
eCommerce Testing Checklist
The final goal of any eCommerce website is more conversion, and there are certain features that you need to consider to achieve this goal. A good website in many aspects has more chances of converting visitors into customers. An e-commerce website testing checklist includes different areas in your website that you might need to test. Here are the most important ones:
1. Website Navigation and Search
Search and navigation are the elements that your visitors interact with the most. Most of your visitors that are using desktop or mobile devices use the search bar to find more information about your brand and explore your website. So it must be a priority for you to keep it clean and frictionless to give your visitors the best experience.
Related Article: eCommerce Navigation: 7 Best Practices You Must Know
2. Homepage Design
Your homepage is the most important page of any website because it’s the face of your brand. Your homepage should be easy on the eye and look creative.
There are different strategies that can help you improve your homepage. However, the most favorable one is website personalization. Personalization greatly impacts revenue growth because 91% of customers like to purchase from brands that understand their needs. Here’s an example of personalization:
Mint Home’s “help me find” service
Mint home helps its customers find the product they’re looking for that’s not available in their shop. Rather than losing their customers to rivals, they help their customers find what they’re looking for through their connections. So they can attract customers even without having the product they need.
Based on your visitors’ needs, heatmaps can give you new ideas about designing your homepage. Want heatmaps? Sign up to WatchThemLive and get started.
3. Shopping Cart and Checkout Process
All eCommerce online store owners know that the cart abandonment rate is high. In fact, the average cart abandonment rate is about 71.4%. However, if your cart abandonment during the checkout process is growing, you should find out why. Here are some of the causes:
- Your check out process is hard and time-consuming.
- Shipping prices are too high.
- Delivery is slow.
- The site requires creating an account.
Improving your check-out process will decrease the number of cart abandonments and increase your eCommerce conversion rate.
4. A Responsive Design
Studies show that 50% of your visitors are mobile device users. Your website should be optimized for any kind of device, whether it’s desktop, mobile, or tablet. Your website’s page load time on desktop might be optimized. However, it can change enormously for mobile devices, so you might want to find a solution for this matter.
What Are the Different Types of Testing in eCommerce?
A comprehensive eCommerce testing strategy includes different types of testing that help you give your visitors a bug-free experience. Here are some of them:
- Functionality
- Usability testing
- Testing page display
- Performance testing
- Database testing
- Testing transactions
Conclusion
In this article, we explained what eCommerce testing is and how when it’s done right it can even help you increase your conversion rate. We provided a checklist, discussed types of eCommerce websites, and gave some examples. In the end, we introduced different types of eCommerce testing that help your visitors have a pain-free experience.
WatchThemLive is an excellent tool that can help you with the testing process. With its heatmaps, you can see which parts of your website have more clicks, and with session replays, you can see the whole journey that your customers go through. Sign up and see what’s next!
