How to test your eCommerce website’s effectiveness

A seamless eCommerce website experience is one of the most important aspects—if not the most important aspect — of doing business online. If the user experience is riddled with errors and misinformation, the customer is more than likely to become confused, and perhaps even end the transaction before it’s finished.

The best way to prevent such a disaster: rigorous testing. By testing each and every step and feature of your eCommerce website, from homepage heroes to the last checkout page, you’ll ensure your eCommerce business is as effective as it can possibly be.

‍Why eCommerce website testing matters

Think of how a traditional brick-and-mortar storefront operates. Now imagine if you walk inside to do business, and the sign is broken, there’s no one on the floor to help you make the right purchase, and the cash register keeps pulling up error messages when you check out. You wouldn’t want to do business there, and you’d likely find somewhere else to spend your money.

Your eCommerce website is just like that — it’s an extension of the old storefronts of yesterday. If it’s full of errors, people will take their business elsewhere.

Testing is a way to ensure repeated business. Taking time up-front to run through all the aspects of your eCommerce business website and to check them for accuracy and a seamless user experience is more likely to bring positive rewards down the road.

How to test your eCommerce website

There are different methods available for testing all aspects of your eCommerce website.

1. You can designate individuals or teams at your business to go through every stage of your website to check for errors, inaccuracies, or other potential potholes that could turn a customer away. You could even solicit volunteers from your entire organization to offer feedback on their own user experience.

2. Another popular testing method is A/B split testing. This type of testing sets up two versions of your eCommerce website with one page acting as the control and another page including a variation. The goal is to determine which page performs better with customers. If it’s the page with the variation, then that becomes your new control.

3. A third way to test is through automated testing. New software testing strategies allow you to perform automated tests of your eCommerce website’s functionality and performance. Benefits to this type of testing include increased testing efficiency and consistency.

What to test on your eCommerce website

What you choose to test on your eCommerce website depends on how it’s built, what product or service you’re selling, and what you want the customer to do (e.g., whether it’s to make a one-time purchase or subscribe to a monthly plan).

Here are some fairly standard places to start testing:

• Search functions — Do they take you to the right product page, or the right section of the website? Is it easy and intuitive for a customer to find what they need?

• Page layout — Is the most important content visible at the top of the page? How do pages look on a mobile device (where many people do their shopping)?

• Content links — Are all the links you have on your page taking customers to the right place?

• Navigation — Does the flow of information and the user experience make sense? Would a customer be confused about where to go to get what they need?

• SEO — Is the copy for your website written with search engine optimization in mind? Is the language you use making it easy for you to be boosted by various search engines?

• Payment — Are your transactions going through without any efforts? Are you ensuring customers their personal data is secure on your platform?

After testing comes scaling your business

Once you’ve successfully tested your eCommerce website, and once customers have started coming in, there’s a whole new challenge on the horizon: scaling your business.

To meet this critical challenge, you can join forces with a global payments partner like LianLian Global. A payments partner takes the guesswork out of scaling your eCommerce business across borders, and LianLian Global is trusted by more than 1.2 million entrepreneurs, marketplaces, and platforms.

Start scaling your eCommerce business today.