Maria Homann
Shopify is a preferred ecommerce platform amongst retailers for several reasons; it’s easy to use, it’s reliable, it integrates with your existing IT landscape, and it can be customized to fit your needs. So shouldn’t testing be easy and simple too?
In this blog post we explain how you can move from manual, tedious testing of orders, checkouts, payments, and more, to quick and efficient automated testing of your ecommerce platform.
This will not only save you time and resources, it will also help you ensure that you don’t risk costly down-time of your Shopify store or buggy user experiences that will cause your customers to leave and never come back.
You will learn:
- Why testing is critical for revenue
- What can cause your Shopify store to break
- What to test to quality assure your Shopify store
- How to speed up testing with easy-to-use automation
Why testing is critical for revenue
The need for retailers to bring their stores online has never been greater. The outbreak of COVID-19 has meant that millions of retailers have been forced to close their brick and mortar stores, exacerbating the urgency for an online presence.
But online stores bring with them a new set of challenges: You can’t rely on your in-store personnel to greet the customers with a smile or to suggest other items they may like, and cash payments aren’t an option when the credit card machine is down. It’s now the retailer’s responsibility that every process, from browsing to checkout, runs smoothly online and leaves the customer wanting more.
On top of that, as ecommerce is growing, customers’ expectations for the shopping experience is also growing. Don’t have a full-fledged search functionality? No advanced filtering options? No AI-enhanced customer support bots? Then you’re probably already ten steps behind your competitors.
Customers expect flawless shopping experiences, and testing your business-critical processes like checkout and payment is the bare minimum you need to be doing to keep your customers happy.
Testing is, in other words, critical for customer attraction, retention, and experience, and hence, your business’ revenue.
Reasons why your Shopify platform may break
Shopify makes it easier for you to create great customer experiences by providing you with a pre-built platform that you can customize to your needs.
However, like all other software vendors and ecommerce platforms, Shopify push out updates on the regular, to make improvements to the software or remove bugs and glitches.
This can bring value, but it can also trigger new issues. Particularly if you have a highly customized platform. This is why regression testing is essential. Regression testing helps you ensure that your most business-critical processes keep working as intended when updates are pushed live by Shopify.
Related reading: What is regression testing?
And regression testing isn’t just important when Shopify make changes - it’s equally important when you make changes or updates. You don’t just need to test new updates, you also need to test all your existing business-critical processes as these may have been affected by your updates. Although you have more control over these changes, they are just as likely to cause bugs.
Last, you also need to test when changes are made to integrations or plugins. You might not be notified about these, so continuous testing is crucial to have in place.
In sum, bugs can be caused by internal and external developments:
- Shopify updates can affect your platform in unexpected ways
- Custom-developed features can cause bugs in other areas of the platform
- Your platform can also be affected by changes to plugins or integrations
What to test to quality assure your Shopify store
The more you test, the better you are protected from bugs. This includes increasing both coverage and frequency of your tests.
The list below gives an overview of what to test, which you can prioritize, based on your starting point:
- Critical functionality: Your business-critical processes are the processes essential to revenue. This includes adding items to a cart, check-out, and payment, and excludes less essential functionality, like filtering, if you have a small webshop.
- Plugins/integrations: Your Shopify-based store is probably connected to a series of other platforms, e.g. CRM systems and payment portals. These are important to test to ensure that data is migrated correctly between them.
- Cross-browser: Customers use different browsers. Research which ones are most popular for your target group, and make sure you’ve got them covered in your tests.
- Cross-device: An increasing amount of online shopping takes place on mobile and tablet devices, instead of desktop. In fact, Business Insider predict that so-called m-commerce will take 44% of the global ecommerce market by 2024. Yet, much testing takes place on desktop. Make sure your tests are aligned with where your customers are.
- Cross-platform: Your users are likely using Windows, Android, MacOS, iOS and Linux. Your platform can behave differently across these, so make sure to test them.
- Load testing: Do you experience sudden influxes in the number of users? Then make sure your platform can carry the weight. The last thing you want is down-time on Black Friday, after you spent thousands of marketing dollars on advertising to bring customers to your site.
- Performance testing: A page that takes more than a few seconds to load can be enough to scare a customer away. Make sure your latest webshop features aren’t having a negative impact on page loading time with performance testing.
Why test automation?
Manually testing all of the above is not only time-consuming, it also involves a high risk of human error as it involves repetitive, data-driven work. To reach a high level of test coverage that will keep you confident that your Shopify store runs as intended, automated testing is therefore a good investment.
A popular tool for web automation is Selenium test automation, as it’s free to use. It’s often chosen as a tool to pilot automation, so that teams can see how much time they can save with automation.
However, most find that Selenium soon takes them more time to set up and use than it saves them on manual work, and hence, isn’t worth the time investment at all. This is because Selenium is code-based, and requires a solid understanding of one of the supported programming languages to use, which most testers do not have.
Instead, a codeless web testing solution can be used.
Automate your web tests quickly and easily with Leapwork
Leapwork is a no-code test automation tool that uses Selenium under the hood for web automation, removes the complexity of coding, and makes it possible to test your webshop end-to-end with ease.
Download the product overview: Testing Shopify with Leapwork
Watch the following video that compares code-based Selenium and no-code Leapwork, to see the difference in speed and ease of use for the tester:
Ready to learn more about Leapwork for Shopify testing? Learn about Leapwork’s automation solution for Shopify or find out how to build great online experiences with automated web testing in our whitepaper: Automated testing for Ecommerce.
