With Black Friday just around the corner, it marks the start of the holiday shopping season and endless opportunities for ecommerce sites to advertise tempting promotions for sales-hungry customers.

In 2021, UK shoppers roughly spent £9.2bn in Black Friday sales. With the cost of living crisis hitting households hard, it’s hard to predict what this year’s figures will be. But what we can be sure of is that brands will need to ensure they offer the best customer experience to capture any new sales in a highly competitive market.

According to eMarketer, smartphone users spend about 90% of smartphone time in apps over browsers. Trends surrounding branded in-app purchases are taking over website-based purchases due to their ease of use, speed, mobile optimisation and personalisation, eradicating any user frustrations which would lead to page or cart abandonment. Customers love quick, simple apps which make the customer journey process intuitive.

Testing keeps you competitive

Part of delivering seamless app experiences to your customers is understanding and testing your user journeys. Tackling glitches and bugs early helps resolve any potential checkout or payment issues or address any frustrating experiences that prevent users from purchasing.

Here are 4 key aspects of testing that you should be doing to ensure the peak season delivers peak sales.

Payments

With a wide range of payment methods now available to consumers, providing your customers with a secure payment process across all devices can be a large task. Make sure your payment integrations are working as they should.

Localisation

Brands with a large global demographic need to be aware of the thousands of devices, browsers and payment methods that their users adopt. Every user wants to feel like their experience is catered towards them and maintaining your localised user base will reflect that. Ensuring languages have been correctly translated, time zones, postcodes, currency, pricing and taxation are all correct will create a loyal global user base.

Cross-browser testing

How many different operating systems, devices, browsers can you customers choose from? Prioritise popular devices but make sure your site and app works across as many devices as possible. Use real testers on real devices, don’t rely purely on simulators.

Load testing

You will need to estimate how many customers will come to your site or app on Black Friday and predict when scenarios such as traffic spikes and hold times are expected to occur. You could look at your traffic levels for last year’s Black Friday to help you estimate your expected customer percentage and loading times this year.

Incorporate testing early to maximise peak season sales

Plan your tests

Bring together all your technical teams to plan how to execute your tests. You’ll need input from your developers, QA engineers and product managers to nail your test plan, scope, objectives and expected results.

Choose your tools

How are you going to test your site or app? To maximise your ecommerce coverage so that every potential Black Friday visitor becomes a buyer, you may want to use crowdsourced website testing to give you an edge. Last minute exploratory testing, real user performance testing, real user in-country live payments and much more done at scale now, so you can do essential bug-fixes before peak season.

For more information about website and app testing for ecommerce businesses visit digivante.com.