According to eMarketer, worldwide retail e-commerce sales grew 27.6% during the last year and accounted for $4.280 trillion in total. Analysts predict that the growth will be slower in 2021, given the rebound of brick-and-mortar businesses. Many people started shopping online because of the lockdown, and this newly-acquired habit is likely to stick.
So, on the one hand, online shoppers become more demanding in terms of the functionality they want to use. On the other hand, retailers have a bunch of new users who need simple and intuitive resources. Creating a functional online store for a vast audience may seem a complicated task under such circumstances. But that’s where software testing services can help out.
We’ve collected some of the top e-commerce test cases our specialists run to ensure online that a store meets user requirements and client’s expectations. In this article, we will focus on manual test cases for an e-commerce website, so store owners have important details to be ready to hire QA engineers.
A homepage in e-commerce is more than a nicely designed cover. It is also a promising marketing tool. This page usually features clickable banners or an auto-scrolling slideshow that redirect visitors to specific pages.
When testing a homepage, QA engineers focus on the logo, top navigation for logged and unlogged users, and go through the keyword search. The task of a QA team is to review the page layout, content visibility, and features. The latter include banners, newsletter subscriptions, social media links in the site footer, etc. Here are some sample test cases for e-commerce website:
So basically, homepage test cases encompass a bit of logging, navigation, and UI test cases we are covering in more detail further in the text.
QA engineers validate registration and logging data during smoke testing. If something doesn’t work at this stage, QA engineers won’t be able to check other features. A product released hastily without smoke testing risks ending up being inaccessible for users. Testing the basic scenarios helps keep a platform properly functioning and ensures simple navigation at the initial stages. Below, you can see some positive and negative test cases for an e-commerce site.
Website navigation in e-commerce websites is usually quite complex. There are at least three essential components QA engineers need to pay attention to during testing:
Users demand convenience in online shopping. Therefore, the search algorithms had to evolve, becoming more sophisticated and more precise. As a user, you expect search results to be relevant. So QA engineers focus on the relevance when they test a search bar. Here are some examples of the cases:
These are two slightly different but closely related features that greatly enhance an e-commerce website experience. The bigger the selection of items is, the more significant search filters are, especially for mobile versions. Annoyed by the endless scrolling, users prefer to abandon a website rather than view a list of irrelevant suggestions.
The filtering feature enables users to navigate the categories, pass to sub-options, and have the exact results displayed in front of their eyes. Meanwhile, sorting allows users to organize items in the preferred order, based on a product name, brand, pricing, etc. To ensure a seamless experience, QA engineers need to pay attention to the following:
According to the Baymard Institute, 20% of desktop and 65% of mobile websites don’t have breadcrumbs. And that’s not a positive trend. Breadcrumbs help shoppers understand where they are on a website and provide access to different hierarchy layers. Therefore, users are more likely to check out other pages and find more items to order. So if there is nothing to check, a QA team should advise on the improvements, ensuring the following:
B Shopping cart is one of the strategic areas that are critical to cover during testing. If website visitors cannot add items to the cart, they have no reasons to stay. Therefore, testing cases should feature all kinds of operations with a chosen item. In other words, shopping cart functionality has to process calculations that are quite complex sometimes. Promotions have the set time frames, coupons, vouchers, and discount codes come with some specific conditions, and it all should fit in the cart logic.
This part of the shopping flow can be tricky due to the variety of payment systems existing nowadays. The task of QA engineers is to make sure the merchant enables the use of various options: Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc. Meanwhile, the site should also automatically calculate the total cost by applying specific charges a chosen payment method implies (if any).
Users may need to update their personal information for different reasons. It can be the expiration of a payment card, change of the shipping address, a mistake made during registration, etc. You can see several examples of test cases below:
UI testing often goes hand in hand with UX, but we’ll discuss them separately. So, UI test cases cover all the graphical elements that let users interact with the coded features. Some of the UI items you can find on different websites are:
In addition to the functionality of UI elements, it is essential to check layout, icons, and images for visual consistency. Output elements, such as notifications, alerts, badges, pop-up windows, etc. fall under this category, too. As for the sample test cases, here are some you should keep in mind:
This list is long and varies a lot depending on the requirements and pages. For example, there may be a set number of checkboxes a user is allowed to check. Thus, make sure to study requirements closely before writing test cases.
Recently, companies and online business owners try to focus more on usability and user experience. Although visual design plays its part in a brand image, it is significant to make sure that an e-commerce website is intuitive and convenient to use. The following test cases help with this task:
These are only some of the core UX test cases. This type of testing requires thorough user research and sometimes business analysis for efficiency improvements.
Last but not least, it is essential to test website performance. This aspect becomes crucial during the holiday shopping season and big marketing campaigns. Still, it is not something to neglect on regular days under average load either. For this, a QA team should check, in particular:
The cases for performance testing are highly individual. The configurations and results always depend on the expected average number of users and business goals in general.
Test cases for e-commerce mobile applications aren’t fundamentally different from test cases for an e-commerce website. Therefore, the majority of cases will work for both channels. Just remember to check them against the app requirements before using those cases. One of the aspects that will differ considerably is app performance. It will require adding some additional scenarios to the test suite. Here are several examples:
There are some features an e-commerce platform owner can evaluate without involving QA services. However, only professional third-party expertise helps to make sure your business is functioning at its full potential. Hopefully, this article will help QA teams to create more efficient test cases. And if you are an e-commerce platform owner looking for essential ways to test your website and/or app, feel free to contact us and discuss the details.
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