Some digital trends for ecommerce, for 2012

Here are a a couple of interesting videos on digital trends for ecommerce in 2012.

As Software Testing Consultants, we believe each of these trends will have large implications on ecommerce technology, the website front-end and back-end systems, and therefore on the testing strategy and effort!


In some of our future posts we plan to address a few of these trends and their implications for testing, in greater depth.

To Know more about our ecommerce testing solutions contact:

Arun Kumar
arun.Kumar@tcl-asia.com

To Know more about our ecommerce testing solutions contact:

Arun Kumar
arun.Kumar@tcl-asia.com

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About TCL:

TCL is a specialist consultancy in software testing.  As a company, our core purpose is to Develop and Deliver World Class Solutions in Software Testing that are Innovative, Structured and Professional.
The company exists to meet the needs of our clients who strive to ensure that their IT projects create value and demonstrate return for their investment.  We are geared to deliver services in all areas of software testing including functional, non functional and process improvement.
The first TCL company was based in the UK (Transition Consulting Limited) and the group has now expanded to include enterprises in the US and India.  A further expansion into Australia or New Zealand is expected within the next five years.
For more details visit: http://www.tcl-global.com/

Why test an ecommerce website? The basics.

E-commerce or E-business is defined as the software and business processes required for businesses to operate solely via web portals, but e-commerce is much more than the provision of a web page as the customer interface. 

Why is testing important in the e-commerce environment? 
The first and primary reason is because technology for e-commerce is, by its very nature, business critical.  The second reason is that the history of e-commerce development is littered with expensive failures, at least some of which could have been avoided by better testing before the site was opened to the general public.

A successful e-commerce application should be usable, secure, reliable, maintainable and highly available to the user. These characteristics relate in part to the web technology that usually underlies e-commerce applications, but they are also dependent on effective integration with other applications.  E-commerce integrates high value, high risk, high performance business critical systems, and it is these characteristics that must dominate the approach to testing: do all the parts work, and do they work well together?

If we simplify matters and consider that an e-commerce site is fundamentally made up of a front end (the human-computer interface), a back end (the software applications underlying the key business processes) and some middleware (the integrating software to link all the relevant software applications), we can plan the independent testing of each of these components.

The front end of an e-commerce site is usually a website that needs testing in its own right.  
The site must be syntactically correct, but it must also offer an acceptable level of service on one or more platforms, and have portability between chosen platforms.  It should be tested against a variety of browsers, to ensure that the website is consistent across browsers.  Usability is a key issue and testing must adopt a user perspective.  The services offered to customers must be systematically explored, including the turnaround time for each service and the overall server response.  This, too, must be exercised across alternative platforms, browsers and network connections.

           

The back end of e-commerce systems will typically include ERP and database applications.  What is essential is to apply the key front end testing scenarios to the back end systems.  In other words, the back end systems should be driven by the same real transactions and data that will be used in front end testing.  The back end may well prove to be a bottleneck for user services, so performance under load and scalability are key issues to be addressed.  Security is an issue in its own right, but also has potential to impact on performance.

Integration is the key to e-commerce. Generally an e-commerce application integrates one or more components such as Database Server, Server-side application scripts/programs, Application server, HTML forms for user interface, Application scripts on the client, Payment server, Scripts/programs to integrate with legacy back-end systems. If an application is being built that uses a database server, web server and the payment server from different vendors, there is considerable effort involved in networking these components, understanding connectivity-related issues and integrating them into a single environment.   

  

Contributed by:

Thanooj Kumar

Transition Consulting Limited

To Know more about our ecommerce testing solutions contact:

Arun Kumar
arun.Kumar@tcl-asia.com

.....................................................................

About TCL:

TCL is a specialist consultancy in software testing.  As a company, our core purpose is to Develop and Deliver World Class Solutions in Software Testing that are Innovative, Structured and Professional.
The company exists to meet the needs of our clients who strive to ensure that their IT projects create value and demonstrate return for their investment.  We are geared to deliver services in all areas of software testing including functional, non functional and process improvement.
The first TCL company was based in the UK (Transition Consulting Limited) and the group has now expanded to include enterprises in the US and India.  A further expansion into Australia or New Zealand is expected within the next five years.
For more details visit: http://www.tcl-global.com/

Two great Infographics on ecommerce website testing.

To Know more about our ecommerce testing solutions contact:

Arun Kumar
arun.Kumar@tcl-asia.com

.....................................................................

About TCL:

TCL is a specialist consultancy in software testing.  As a company, our core purpose is to Develop and Deliver World Class Solutions in Software Testing that are Innovative, Structured and Professional.
The company exists to meet the needs of our clients who strive to ensure that their IT projects create value and demonstrate return for their investment.  We are geared to deliver services in all areas of software testing including functional, non functional and process improvement.
The first TCL company was based in the UK (Transition Consulting Limited) and the group has now expanded to include enterprises in the US and India.  A further expansion into Australia or New Zealand is expected within the next five years.
For more details visit: http://www.tcl-global.com/

What do top ecommerce companies perceive as the top opportunities for improvement?

The key is not to prioritise what's on your schedule,
but to schedule your priorities. 

Stephen Covey

No company, not even the largest ones, can do everything at once.
But how you prioritise speaks volumes about who you are and can hugely impact on how your brand is perceived and naturally this will impact on business results.

So, when ecommerce toppers and laggards (across geographies, verticals and sizes) were researched by a prominent retail research company on what they prioritise as major opportunities, significant differences emerged in their thought patterns.

Some of this could reflect the fact that emerging or relatively new ecommerce players are still in the early phase of being worried about the nuts & bolts operations like payments, promotions and social integration.

But those are now considered the bare essentials, as technology improves almost everyone will be able to offer a smooth and secure online shopping experience and will enable sharing across social media.

Online, as in real life, what will set a brand apart is the store experience.
Spectacular merchandising, Rich media, augmented reality, virtual assistants, the more memorable the customer’s experience the more she/he values the Brand.

Of course there are cross channel opportunities, but once you have mastered the art of creating memorable experiences for your customers, you can port that skill across various channels much more easily, than trying to do everything at once.

So, if you are a new ecommerce company, striving to get and retain customers, would you rather invest in

a) A great "in-house merchandiser" and a “customer experience designer” who can delight your customer and love doing what they do?
                                               Or
b) A large in-house technical team including a small army of testers, who are bored to death?


If you said b you must have your reasons, but if you said a, then TCL can be a trusted and valuable partner. We offer end-to-end ecommerce portals/ website testing services that can free up your capital to invest in strategic resources who could change the future of your company.

We believe in the value of an early engagement with our clients, and that does not necessarily mean increased testing costs, but almost always means an overall reduction in project costs and of course the avoidance of potential revenue loss and damage to reputation.


To know more:
Contact K. V. Shashi Kiran
Shashi.Kiran@tcl-asia.com
+91 984 500 8696 

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About TCL:

TCL is a specialist consultancy in software testing.  As a company, our core purpose is to Develop and Deliver World Class Solutions in Software Testing that are Innovative, Structured and Professional.
The company exists to meet the needs of our clients who strive to ensure that their IT projects create value and demonstrate return for their investment.  We are geared to deliver services in all areas of software testing including functional, non functional and process improvement.
The first TCL company was based in the UK (Transition Consulting Limited) and the group has now expanded to include enterprises in the US and India.  A further expansion into Australia or New Zealand is expected within the next five years.
For more details visit: http://www.tcl-global.com/

Testing everything, and how the future might look

When we talk testing (we presume most of you are software testers) your mind would obviously jump to the last test case you ran or the last killer "bug" you detected and logged. 

But the word testing covers a wide gamut of possibilities, everything could  (some would say must) be tested. Including content for the web.

Now, how does one test content?

Of course there are spell checks and grammar checks, but apart from that what can be done to ensure that the content is optimised to deliver what it is supposed to?

Turns out there's a lot that can be done, if you have the right resources and if you are determined to approach digital marketing in a structured, result-oriented manner.

SAP for instance has set up a digital test lab to standardise the testing of all content to be published on the company's Web pages—including usability, design and registration forms—as well as on its mobile- enabled site launched recently.

In their own words:

“We take an idea [such as an offer] and look at all the things that lead up to a conversion—the process, Web pages, design, user experience, content, offer and actual registration process,” he said. “Then we do a blend of A/B and multivariate testing, and image testing [such as putting an image next to the offer], to see where we get the most significant lift.”

Similarly, HP is another company that is making content testing a priority.

“We have a publishing calendar every week, which looks at all the content we're pushing out to meet our corporate goals,we use LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to see what topics resonate.”

We won't get into too many details here, as this post is not about content testing, but
imagine that, entire teams dedicated to testing content!

As our world becomes more digital,data-driven, cloud-hosted and mobile, and as software becomes ubiquitous, present everywhere from fridges to cars and household robots, the lines between different types of testing, analytics and strategy consulting might blur.
What we might have are large Independent "testing" Labs that test everything, from design, to content, products, software and everything else.They would not only test, but would predict future problems and suggest strategies to overcome them.

Is that another way of saying "Full Services IT Company", we don't know, but we don't think so.
What we see as the next generation of Independent Testing Labs, are teams that would offer hybrid services of testing, analytics and strategy, but not necessarily design and development.

The skills that will be in demand would be the ability to grasp concepts, new business models and consumer insights, and being able to put together information in different ways, create virtual proofs of concept through high-end predictive data analytics (or sheer intuition) and being able to foresee problems and point them out in advance.

Customers will pay a premium for this ability to predict scenarios and outcomes, not by crystal-gazing, but through a combination of intuition, testing and advanced analytics.

To Know more:

http://www.btobonline.com/article/20120409/WEB05/304099947/marketers-embrace-digital-content-testing
http://www.cisionwire.com/nelsonhall/r/nelsonhall-publishes-software-testing-market-analysis,c9237640

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About TCL:

TCL is a specialist consultancy in software testing.  As a company, our core purpose is to Develop and Deliver World Class Solutions in Software Testing that are Innovative, Structured and Professional.
The company exists to meet the needs of our clients who strive to ensure that their IT projects create value and demonstrate return for their investment.  We are geared to deliver services in all areas of software testing including functional, non functional and process improvement.
The first TCL company was based in the UK (Transition Consulting Limited) and the group has now expanded to include enterprises in the US and India.  A further expansion into Australia or New Zealand is expected within the next five years.
For more details visit: http://www.tcl-global.com/