Introduction:

i. Testing an e-commerce is an essential activity to check for non-performance with the business and user requirements.

ii. Bugs and errors, identified during testing are fixed to ensure reliability of the site.

iii. A test plan is a document detailing a systematic approach to testing a system.

iv. A test plan documents the strategy that will be used to verify and ensure that a product or system meets its design specifications and other requirements.

Aspects of the site to be tested:

The various aspects of the site that need to tested are as follows:

i. Functionality:

• Initially, the main functionality of the e-commerce site needs to be tested. This includes testing of various pages in the website such as home page, featured products, special offers, Information pages such as About pages, Shipping Information, Returns Policy, Terms Page, Privacy policy etc. Various functionalities like product filters, ability to sort products by name, price, colour etc. need to be tested. In addition to this, product detail pages like product title, description, images, keyword search etc. need to be tested.

ii. Checkouts and Payment Systems:

• Test the checkout process including the following aspects:

  • Final amount to pay – make sure that this value is correct, after the price of the products, VAT, delivery and any other charges. Test making changes to the products being ordered, changing delivery options, etc. and make sure that this final amount updates correctly.
  • For payments the following tests can be conducted:
  • Carry out a test payment using each payment method being offered such as debit cards, credit cards, Paypal, Google Checkout, etc.
  • Check that confirmation emails are sent correctly when a payment is made, whether those confirmation emails are being sent by your website or by the payment provider.

iii. Browser Compatibility:

• Extremely important, especially for ecommerce sites, if the site doesn’t work in a particular browser then nobody using that browser can perform any transactions in it. The functionality developed needs to be tested in the following browsers:
  • Internet Explorer 7
  • Internet Explorer 8
  • Internet Explorer 9
  • Internet Explorer 10
  • Mozilla Firefox (latest version)
  • Google Chrome (latest version)
  • Safari

iv. Performance Testing:

• Performance testing is in general testing performed to determine how ae-commerce website performs in terms of responsiveness and stability under a particular workload. It can also serve to investigate, measure, validate or verify other qualityattributes of the site, such as scalability, reliability and resource usageThe ecommerce website needs to load quickly in order for potential customers to not get frustrated and head elsewhere. Performance test can be carried out using an online tool such as Webpagetest or Apache Jmeter.

v. Web Standards:

• Often overlooked, a few checks on how the website complies with HTML and CSS standards can greatly help the website’s accessibility, usability and other general site quality problems.