The importance of End-to-End Tests in Ecommerce Platforms

Ecommerce Businesses need Autify. But, why?

In Ecommerce, the conversion rate is the measure in which potential customers become actual customers (conversion) by responding to a call to action. This very concept is tied to the conversion path, which is understood as the steps a user must take –or stages they must go through (aka behavioral funnel)– in order to not only make a purchase, but become a satisfied, loyal customer.

These steps are pretty much defined in this way:

1. Page landing: user enters our Ecommerce site.
2. Attention calling: user browses our product or service catalog, and starts considering options relevant to their interest by adding such items to the shopping cart.
3. Decision: convinced about the product, the user goes on to complete the purchase by doing the respective checkout and payment.
4. Retention: by this time, the user is converted into a client, and so on the way to checkout or after checkout/payment, they could be shown a list of products related to their preference and receive an email newsletter, suggesting them to make new purchases.
5. Referral: after the customer receives their product and declares satisfaction with the post-purchase service (customer/tech support, etc) –should any concerns arise, they can encourage family, friends or other people in general to visit the store –by mouth to mouth recommendation, posting a review of the purchased product on the store site, etc.

These points make quite clear the importance of testing our Ecommerce site’s UI and the whole catalog browsing/product purchase flow (end-to-end or E2E) process, especially the top selling products.

Cart Abandonment

An Ecommerce term which defines the behavior of a web page visitor who leaves the site without completing a desired action, e.g.: adds items from to the shopping cart but doesn’t complete the purchase.

Recent statistics show that the global average cart abandonment rate as of 2021 was almost 81%, and here are some of the reasons for this:

• 34% were ‘just looking’ i.e. not ready to buy.
• 23% had an issue with shipping.
• 18% wanted to compare prices.
• 15% decided to buy in-store instead.
• 6% abandoned due to a lack of payment options.
• 4% experienced a technical issue.

As we can see, ‘technical issues’ comprehend a very small portion of all the reasons. However, if we look closely at the reasons for site abandonment during checkout specified in this study, we may find out some interesting insights:

13% experienced errors and crashes on the website. That is certainly a significant figure. Another important reason to monitor our Shopify or Woocommerce platforms for errors.

This all means abandoned carts are –among other things– associated with poor site performance and bad user experience. Users tend to abandon the shopping flow when, for example, the cart takes too long to update –87% of Online Shoppers Will Abandon Cart If Checkout Process Lengthy or Complicated, or when the server throws a 504 error midway through the checkout.

Given the loss of revenue experienced by so many companies, maintaining end-to-end workflows in order to improve customer experience is critical to regain that 13% of users and potential customers.

Failures in processing times are another cause of important revenue loss –in the order of billions, just in the US. Customers hold specific expectations, with competitors like Amazon and its fast delivery service, hence shifting to proactive E2E monitoring is key to reduce such losses and improve processing times.

Some insightful statistics to consider:

• 69% of consumers “are much less or less likely to shop with a retailer in the future if an item they purchased is not delivered within two days of the date promised.” (source)
• 17% of respondents will stop shopping with a retailer after receiving a late delivery one time. (source)
• 55% of respondents will stop shopping with a retailer after receiving a late delivery two to three times. (source)

Then again. Why Autify?

Autify can help your company generate ROI, increasing sales by mitigating those revenue killing errors.

With our Artificial Intelligence powered, no code platform, you can monitor your Ecommerce site’s conversion funnels, checking the correct fulfillment of workflows through the execution of thorough E2E tests.

Autify can identify and locate elements in a user interface. Instead of having to modify certain classes for the testware to adapt to changes in the application code, our tool can register those changes and immediately adapt the test cases, and so we get rid of many boring, time-consuming maintenance tasks. Invest your resources’ valuable time in real creative work instead of writing test scripts. The power of our AI/Machine Learning powered, no code platform can learn changes in your application and adapt to them, making manual flow monitoring a thing of the past –and all this in an absolutely autonomous way.

Besides increasing your E2E test coverage, Autify will help you increase the overall test coverage. By eliminating the test phase –automating tests at the initial stage of the development process, times and costs are dramatically reduced.

Last but not least, high quality customer support is another key to revenue, and that shows in our success, which is inexorably reflected in the success of our customers:

Autify, Inc. is proud to announce that Appify Technologies, Inc. has implemented Autify, our E2E test automation platform for web applications.

You can see other success stories from our customers here: https://autify.com/why-autify