Is your eCommerce ready for Black Friday?

Those in e-commerce and retail are already in the midst of preparations for Black Friday, the most important sales event of the year in the United States that has landed overseas with enormous success in recent years. As the chart shows, in Italy, too, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become for all intents and purposes tasty occasions to kick off the Christmas shopping season and beyond with momentum. But is your ecommerce ready for Black Friday?


According to Smart Insights, "Holiday shopping is crucial as about 30% of annual retail sales occur between Black Friday and Christmas."

In order to make ecommerce site ready for Black Friday, companies and organizations operating in the retail and e-commerce sector plan major promotion strategies with a spike in the volume of communications especially at the digital level, so it becomes crucial to pay special attention to one's strategy and plan activities wisely.

One must also watch out for usability bugs and frictions that can affect the shopping cart abandonment rate. An example?

One of our clients believed that in some states in the U.S. his products were not liked while it was simply an e-Commerce glitch that prevented the customer from finalizing the purchase! Impossible to find out except by testing with local users.


Let's get straight to the point and discover best practices.

Make sure you're ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday: here are best practices to incorporate into your digital strategy

1. Define your business goals including estimating peak loads to ensure that your website and mobile app can deliver high performance even under stress.
   
   
2. Involve your entire technical team in defining your Business goals: developers, QA engineers, DevOps, product managers will run tests and prepare your infrastructure, app and site for Black Friday. This way you will get an overview of the current state of performance, planning functional tests in time.
   
   
3. Plan your digital property testing (here are some you may need: Explorative Bug Finding, Test Case Bug Finding, Usability testing, Chatbot testing) by choosing the type of testing that best suits your needs.
   
   
4. Focus on optimizing UX and increasing Conversion Rate.
   
   
5. Test on new devices and operating systems. With the everchanging models and OS it is fundamenta to always keep up with the latest version of all devices, now is the time to catch up!
   
   
6. Analyze the results: each crowdtesting project concludes with a detailed report written by one of our Quality Managers that contains a list of the issues encountered, but more importantly, the best practices needed to resolve them.
7. One round of testing is not enough! Performing tests before the release of each update and before each loading period is the strategy that guarantees a significant improvement in your reality's digital performance, reducing costs and increasing campaign conversions.

How else can Crowdtesting help you be ready for Black Friday?

Crowdtesting is a service that collects feedback from end users in real conditions of use: it is the perfect methodology to verify that your digital properties are performing both functionally and in terms of usability. It also allows you to reduce time: it takes only 24 hours to get the first results.

Thanks to our worldwide crowd of testers and our network of UX researchers, we can guarantee improved user experience by offering practical suggestions on how to improve UX based on feedback from real users. These improvements have been shown in retail and e-commerce to increase Conversion Rate and reduce cart abandonment rate (contact us to learn more about concrete cases and results).