The test your e-commerce needs before Black Friday

In recent years, the transition of shopping to online has been consolidated, a factor that impacts the busiest sales period. We’re talking about Black Friday, Cyber Monday and, of course, Christmas. The data speaks for itself: after the growth of recent years, it is expected that the turnover of the global eCommerce market will reach $632.70 billion in 2024. And the numbers are set to rise between now and 2029:

Fig. 1 and 2 - eCommerce revenue 2017-2029, Europe and Italy

 Source: Statista. 

To date, the positive trend is also confirmed by the Report B2C eCommerce in Italy of the Digital Innovation Observatories of the Polytechnic University of Milan, according to which in our country the turnover recorded in 2023 grew by 13 percentage points, recording a overall turnover of 54.2 billion euros against 47.9 the previous year.

Fig. 3 - The value of B2c eCommerce purchases in Italy between products and services, 2018-2023, values in billion euros.

Source: Digital Innovation Observatories - Polytechnic University of Milan .

E-commerce, therefore, is one of the most profitable channels for reaching the greatest number of customers possible. But how to maximize its performance and profitability?

Andrea Saletti, an expert in Neuromarketing, writes: "The overall purpose of any eCommerce? Helping people make two choices. We make decisions every day based on how options are presented to us. These could be simple decisions, like choosing the sandwich that looks tastiest in a café window, or more complex ones, like evaluating which barbecue to buy for our garden. In all these mechanisms the context in which we decided to purchase makes the difference [...]. The choices the user makes, in fact, are of 2 types:

• the product or service he or she wants to purchase,
• the place where that choice will be made: there or somewhere else."

What we want to do in this article is to give you some tools to ensure that your customer does not choose to buy elsewhere. Let's first look at the reasons why your customers abandon the shopping cart:

Fig. 4 – Reasons for cart abandonment during checkout

Source: Baymard, Reasons for Cart Abandonment (2024 data). 

Need to create an account, long checkout processes, ambiguity, security, bugs. What do all these reasons for customers abandoning your shopping cart have in common? Certainly, the ability to be identified through functional and experiential testing.

Black Friday, is your site living up to expectations (and spike in users)? 

As market analysis shows, Black Friday is very important in consumer sentiment, so much so that in Italy almost half of respondents, according to a survey conducted in 17 countries, plan to make some purchases.

Fig. 5 - Share of consumers most likely to take advantage of Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales during the holiday season worldwide in 2022, by country

Source: Statista. 

Italy is in fact perfectly in line with the global trend, with 44% of consumers declaring themselves interested in taking advantage of Black Friday offers for their Christmas shopping. This means that eCommerce platforms could potentially be put to the test. 

User experience, the first aspect to be taken care of

We all know, also from direct experience, that there are some aspects that cannot be overlooked in an eCommerce shopping experience. A positive impression throughout the purchase process is guaranteed only if the eCommerce platform is able to offer the necessary fluidity to make the activity pleasant and not frustrating.

Especially on days when there are significant sales peaks, such as Black Friday , eCommerce will necessarily have to be well-oiled to support extra activity and an unprecedented quantity of transactions. Needless to say, if the site is not properly tested, the risk of disaster is just around the corner. Crashing the payment system, for example, is something that should never happen, especially on a key day like Black Friday!

So how to prevent customers from abandoning the shopping cart prematurely because of some technical glitch? Here are some tests to help us for our online shop to be carried out before Black Friday and the Christmas period. Only through targeted testing will it be possible to determine the user's level of satisfaction in using the eCommerce platform, understand their behavior, feelings and perceptions throughout the purchasing process.

In order for the user to be impressed by a pleasant and intuitive experience, you will need to put your site under stress, to understand which elements work correctly and which do not, analyzing the different tasks a buyer is asked to perform when he or she wants to buy, assessing how difficult it is to perform them, for example.

Nowadays, the fact that an eCommerce platform provides a solid and tested user experience (UX) makes all the difference: it ensures that the site gives all the information needed for an easy, fast, intuitive purchase without any inconvenience along the way.

Take care of the Check Out steps

The Check Out of an online store is one of the most important steps in the entire buying process. Why test it? Here is a typical situation: the user already has the product in the shopping cart, has therefore chosen it and is willing to pay for it, but if right at this moment something goes wrong, the sales opportunity could vanish in a second.

Of course, other factors come into play in this debacle, such as lack of trust, price, but the job of a good eCommerce site is to make things so easy for the consumer that they click on “pay now” without hesitating.

The Check Out process begins when a user stops adding products to the cart and decides to complete the purchase. Its main stages include:

• cart validation;
• login or customer account creation;
• choice of delivery method;
• payment selection;
• order confirmation.

These stages of the purchasing process can take place on a single page, but they are usually spread across multiple pages, in order to cushion the data entry and tasks that the user is subjected to just before the critical moment of payment. The advantage of proceeding on a single page is that the Check Out will be quicker and more transparent, whereas when it is spread over different pages it is certainly more cumbersome, but it also has its positive aspects, as it allows more information to be collected, such as the customer's email, even if they drop out. In addition, breaking down the process into several steps also contributes to a cleaner and more intuitive layout, a factor that the end user will definitely recognize as a positive.

After selecting the payment method, customers should be able to check the order details one more time before confirming the purchase. Now it's time to pay: as soon as the transaction is made, the system should show a confirmation page and automatically send a summary e-mail to the customer. This entire procedure, which may seem obvious, actually has its pitfalls, so much so that Check Out is one of the mission critical processes for an eCommerce platform. The succession of these mini-tasks for the customer in the closing phase of the purchase should be handled with extreme caution to prevent 69 percent of shoppers from abandoning the cart prematurely, as this Baymard Institute analysis confirms. A very high rate, therefore, at least from what emerges in the findings of the 2023 report.

Fig. 6 - Analysis of the checkout user experience. Design and payment flow are often the only reasons why users abandon the shopping cart during the checkout process

Source: Baymard Institute.

This scatter graph clearly shows the UX scores for 17 topics predicted in the analysis of 71 sites in reference to the Check Out flows. The benchmark shows that only 23 of the 71 US and European eCommerce sites examined had a “decent” Checkout UX performance, while 6 others scored “good”. The fact that should be worrying, however, is that no one was judged “perfect”. The analysis also shows that, on average, there are (for each site) 31 usability problems  that are completely avoidable in the payment flow.

Security: test your site with Ethical Hacking

It is not only the problems at Check Out that should be of concern. Usability can be difficult for a user and sometimes push them to abandon the purchase, but it is never dangerous, as security issues can be, to which an eCommerce may be more exposed, especially during Black Friday.

To test the vulnerabilities of an eCommerce site, it is a good idea to simulate a cyber-attack, exactly as a hacker would do. When testing the security of a site, it is a good idea to assess all possible entry points and vulnerabilities by hiring ethical hackers, certified professionals who can get into the mind of a hacker and predict their moves. By providing them with authorized attack targets, you will be able to intercept the weak points of your website and understand how to reduce the risks.

The PenTest, or how to simulate a cyber attack

The test involving Ethical Hacking is also known as the Penetration Test, which aims precisely to simulate an actual cyber attack. Performing a Penetration Test (PenTest) allows you to understand the degree of impact that a cyber threat could have on the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data in eCommerce platforms, which store sensitive information that must be protected with maximum levels of security. The primary goal is to prevent criminals from gaining access to credit card data, for example. At the end of the PenTest, a vulnerability report is drawn up, with the analysis of the critical issues, their impacts and the related recommendations for their correction.

Thanks to Ethical Hacking interventions, you can plan the execution of both manual and automated tests for an eCommerce site and evaluate the results of both, going well beyond the suspicious activities that emerge from a simple vulnerability scan. In many cases, scans even tend to show false positives or intercept other vulnerabilities that do not actually have a significant impact on the business.

The Stress Test

On Black Friday weekend and in the weeks before Christmas, your eCommerce will have a spike in users. Site traffic could also double or triple between late November and December. It goes without saying that Stress Testing is critical to understand the extent to which your eCommerce can function properly under stress.

To do such a test, one has to take the e-store to the limit, and doing so will tell us whether it is ready for an overload of users or whether instead there are signs that suggest possible crashes or slowdowns.

According to a research by Retail System Research  (RSR), in the case of slow loading on an eCommerce:

• 76% of consumers do not start their purchasing journey on a brand's website, but rather on Google or Amazon.
• 92% of online shoppers are frustrated with the slow loading of retail websites.
• 87% of shoppers will not wait for a slow site to load and want it to load in less than 4 seconds.
• If a site takes too long to load, 53% of shoppers say they will abandon the site to buy from a similar brand and 39% to buy from Amazon.
• 67% of consumers buy through social media.

This type of performance Stress Test cannot be improvised precisely because it must reflect as faithfully as possible the actual load scenarios, thus providing realistic quantitative results. To this end, the 20 years' experience of our partners at Moviri  in the field of performance testing comes to our aid.

By performing the Stress Test it is possible, in a short time, to identify bottlenecks and plan interventions to prepare for extraordinary events. Through a preliminary analysis of your e-commerce system, Moviri will be able to create a suitable load to stress your system in the most realistic way possible. In this way, you will be able to effectively simulate, hour by hour, what happens during Black Friday and analyse the behaviour of all the system components by acting in conjunction with the monitoring already at your disposal.

The Functional Test

• Do you know how many combinations of browsers and devices are out there? More than 24,000! Not to mention the combinations of screen resolutions and operating systems. To ensure that your e-commerce (site and app) works on all possible combinations, just run a functional eCommerce test. By doing it with us in crowdtesting, and therefore involving real users with their real devices, you will be able to cover a very high number of combinations. A test like this is very complex to carry out in-lab: the development team would have to have a huge number of devices and a lot of time to test.

  Bugs are the worst enemy of conversion, the numbers say so:

  • 69% of online shoppers abandon their shopping cart (Moosend);
  • 84% of users won't come back to try an app if it doesn't work once (Techcrunch).
  
  

Test Automation

• While the other tests mentioned in the article are tests conducted manually, this one, as the name implies, is automated. It is a Quality Assurance measurement that has some requirements to be carried out. Therefore, the test should be:

  • repeatable: it would make no sense to automate a test that is run only once.
  • devoid of opinion: qualitative judgment can be made by testers in a manual test (as in thinking aloud, which we will discuss later).
  • determinant: when a function is determinant, it means that the result is always the same whenever the same inputs are given.

  The advantages are:

  • the reduction of end-to-end (E2E) testing time,
  • exhaustive tests on known paths (but be careful: with automated tests you only test what you submit to the test!),
  • ability to test at each development and multi-browser coverage.

  In particular, this type of test is useful when:

  • you have a high number of regressions (i.e., there are known bugs coming back into production);
  • you have a lot of resources testing, but few features released;
  • when a "bottleneck" occurs in testing;
  • you need to test the entire flow as a whole (E2E);
  • new call-to-action.

   

The Localization Test

The geographic location of a website can greatly affect the performance of a test. Why? There are those who believe that it is enough to simply translate the contents into another language for everything to work as it should. Unfortunately, a perfect translation of the site is not enough. There are things that cannot simply be translated from one eCommerce to another.

For example, the cultural background, the symbols, the orientation of citizens towards individualism or collectivism, tolerance, uncertainty and ambiguity, the types of fonts used, the search engines and, of course, the payment methods available.

For this reason it is essential to test with real users of the country for which the e-commerce is intended  (We did this, for example, for Bending Spoons with testers in the United States). One company that knows this extremely well is McDonald's, which has a completely different website depending on the country.

Fig. 7 - McDonald's: Italian website and Chinese website

Testing in Thinking Aloud

According to Jakob Nielsen, the great pioneer of usability, the Thinking Aloud test is the prince of Usability Tests.

In a test of this type, the user is asked to express their experience in words and out loud: what are their thoughts, actions, intentions and the difficulties encountered during the interaction with a tested product or service.

To do this, we select your buyer personas from our Crowd of testers. These remote users (it is important that they are in real conditions of use, therefore at home, on the subway, etc.) record videos which are then analyzed by UX researchers. After the test, therefore, not only are usability frictions intercepted, but also suggestions for improvement.

Other benefits of Thinking Aloud:

• capture preferences about the product and therefore its effectiveness in real time (right during use!) and avoid relying on post-use surveys;
• point out and comment on common misunderstandings about certain elements and draw advice on a possible redesign;
• if used in the design phase, it allows you to reassure UX designers about the quality of the choices they have made, or help them make a choice (A/B testing);
• have a better understanding of the user's mental model, like a real "window into the soul".

Accessibility: don't forget the inclusion factor

Accessibility is one of the factors that will offer all users the possibility of navigating the site and therefore making payments in your online shop without problems. When designing a web page, you need to create the right conditions so that everyone can use the user interface regardless of possible disabilities. This experiential factor is central for all users to have guaranteed access to the website. In turn, good accessibility also makes it possible to expand the customer base to include all those who would otherwise be excluded from the possibility of purchase.

Emphasising the topic of accessibility is important, since some of its applications can benefit everyone, not just users with a disability. A classic example of universally accessible website design is the use of captions in videos: originally developed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, captions quickly proved to be very useful for a wide range of users, such as those who do not understand a foreign language or who are immersed in a noisy environment, or who are unable to turn up the volume themselves so as not to disturb others. This reinforces our initial premise that any feature designed and engineered with broad accessibility in mind can benefit all users. Especially if it is an eCommerce site, where more features correspond to a higher probability of sales.

These are the main tests your e-commerce business needs before the holidays. At UNGUESS we conduct them in Crowdtesting, that is, involving real users, testers and your buyer personas that we select from our Crowd. They come from all over the world and are connected to our platform, chosen and managed by our Customer Success Managers for each test campaign. For UX testing, researchers are also added who analyze videos recorded by users and provide you with suggestions for improving your eCommerce.

If you are the one who finds usability bugs and frictions, your potential customer will not be faced with the choice of buying elsewhere.