For consumers, e-commerce (or online commerce) is just about browsing through an online catalogue of items and buying the items that meet their requirements. However, a lot of complex tech runs behind the scenes in any e-commerce website.
Website views, SKU (Stock Keeping Unit), etc. are important metrics for an e-commerce website but the important factor that impacts sales is ‘conversion’. In simple terms, conversion rate is defined as the percentage of visitors to the e-commerce website who eventually convert into a customer.
Every portal that involves any type of financial transaction strives hard to increase the conversion rate, as that eventually helps in improving the sales numbers. Since conversion rate is the core pillar of any e-commerce website, site owners should invest significantly in improving the website experience – a factor that helps improve conversion and sales.
In this blog, we look at why companies into e-commerce testing services should focus on conversion testing. Before we deep dive into the topic, we look at the essentials of conversion testing.
What is E-Commerce Conversion Testing?
As an e-commerce website owner, your first priority should be to perform well on different aspects related to SEO (i.e. on-page SEO and off-page SEO). It helps build brand visibility as well as boosts website rankings on search engines. This helps in improving the overall discoverability of the website, which in turn brings more traffic (or visitors) to the site.
It is a known fact that not every visitor will convert into a paid customer. Hence, e-commerce business owners strive hard to increase the overall percentage of paid users (or customers).
Conversion in e-commerce is the total number of visitors who purchased on the site divided by the total number of visitors on the site. As per Google, conversion rate in e-commerce is indicated by ‘the ratio of transactions to sessions expressed as a percentage’.
E-commerce businesses are always on the lookout to improve the conversion rate which in turn helps in improving sales! E-Commerce conversion testing is the overall process of improving the conversion rates by testing the various functionalities of the website.
Why Should E-commerce Companies Invest in Conversion Testing?
Conversion testing in e-commerce is focused on improving the functional aspects by bringing in incremental improvements on the website. The major agenda of conversion testing is to reduce the overall friction between the site and the visitors landing on the site. Higher the friction, lower would be the conversion rate.
Since conversion rates affect the sales numbers, it is important for e-commerce companies to invest in conversion testing. Companies that want to expedite the testing process can also partner with an e-commerce testing company like KiwiQA. It has helped numerous e-commerce companies improve conversions via efficient and scalable forms of testing.
Also Read – 5 Best Practices for E-commerce Testing
Here are some of the key metrics that need to prioritized when rolling out conversion testing:
1. Cart Abandon Rates
Here customers have added items to the cart but abandoned them, without completing the purchase. Non-purchase directly impacts the sales.
Cart abandonment also provides an indication that the customer might have liked the website features (and/or product pricing) but might have found a better and frictionless experience on other e-commerce platforms.
2. Bounce Rates
Bounce rate means that the visitor left the website without making any purchase. The combination of bounce rate and time spent on site can be analyzed for understanding the rate (or frequency) at which visitors are bouncing from the site.
Bounce rate is not a direct indicator of product experience but it is a metric that heavily impacts sales. Higher the bounce rate, lesser are chances of converting visitors into paid customers!
Also Read – The Ultimate Checklist for E-Commerce Website Testing
3. Time to Purchase
This is the duration being spent by users when making a purchase on the site. Lower time to purchase equates to better search, improved discoverability, and a frictionless checkout process.
Exploratory testing can also be combined with conversion tests to ensure that every corner case is covered during the process.
4. Identification of Key Pain points
During the process of testing the website features, the QA team will be able to unearth a lot of issues that might be impacting the conversion of the site. Heatmap analysis will be extremely helpful to figure out the bounce rates. A/B testing can be planned to check what’s ticking with the users as far as the website design is concerned.
Apart from these important metrics, you should also track the percentage of returning users. Usage of A/B testing tools, heat map analysis, and collective feedback will be instrumental in improving the overall experience of the website.
Tests To Improve Conversion Rate
Now that we have touched upon the essentials of conversion testing, let’s look at some of the tests (manual and automated) that would help improve e-commerce conversions.
Checkout process testing
A higher cart abandonment is an indicator that there is a huge amiss in the checkout process. A series of manual and automated tests can be performed for adding products to the cart and mimicking the entire checkout process.
This will help in testing the complete user flow (i.e. product discovery, product selection, addition to cart, and product checkout).
Exploratory Testing
Though automation testing using frameworks like Cypress, Selenium, etc. can be used to test the features of the site; corner cases might not figure in this planned test process.
In such cases, exploratory testing can be helpful in unearthing issues that would have otherwise gone unnoticed using traditional testing methods.
Apart from these tests that can be performed to improve overall website experience, you should look at testing the shipping sensitivity, running performance tests, and more.
Also Read – 7 Effective E-commerce Website Testing Techniques
Conclusion
E-commerce (or online commerce) has become mainstream in almost all the countries, owing to the widespread mobile and internet penetration. However, the overall sales of any e-commerce website largely depends on the conversion rate.
In this blog of the e-commerce testing tutorial series, we had a detailed look at some of the integral aspects of conversion testing. In scenarios where the internal test team does not have enough proficiency, it is best to partner with a QA vendor like KiwiQA that has expertise in providing a range of e-commerce testing services.