In today’s fast-paced digital world, eCommerce has become an integral part of consumers’ lifestyles. Shopping has become much easier now when you can order any item you like, the instant you want it. When it comes to eCommerce, customers expect a state-of-the-art experience on online shopping platforms. Hence, it becomes crucial for businesses to make their shopping platforms of superior quality that work well in all scenarios. Just a small glitch and the customer is lost.
Shopify is one of the most widely used eCommerce platforms that powers millions of stores worldwide. When you are building an online store, testing its performance becomes crucial to ensure you release an error-free product in the market. Manual testing is possible but it becomes extremely difficult, costly, and time-consuming when the store becomes bigger and more complex.
Shopify automated testing is the solution that new companies are going for these days because of its numerous benefits. Your product must be tested for handling high traffic and across multiple platforms and devices to be able to provide a consistent experience to the shoppers.
In this article, we will examine how automation testing enhances the quality of your online store, the key areas it looks for, and the tools and best practices you must adopt to deliver a smooth and reliable shopping journey to your customers.
What is Shopify Automation Testing?
Shopify automation testing is the use of automated processes or tools for testing the functionality and performance of your online Shopify store across various devices, OS, and browsers. Sure, you can do the same kind of testing manually, but automation testing uses test scripts and frameworks to run test cases automatically any number of times.
For every single minor update in your store, manual testing becomes too laborious and time-consuming. When done automatically, you just need to write the test script once and reuse it as many times as you want. All you need to do is just hit run on your testing tool, and it will automatically run the test cases by itself.
This allows you to focus more on enhancing the quality of your testing process by giving you more bandwidth to create more test cases rather than spending time running them.Â
Integrating automated testing into Shopify development practices can help maintain consistent quality control throughout the entire development lifecycle.
Why use Shopify Automation Testing
The modern technology being used for developing a Shopify store is becoming more and more complex because of the growing features of the store, wider usage behaviours, and different environments on which they run. Automation testing covers all those scenarios while providing a greater experience to the testers by saving time, effort, and cost. A few reasons for using automated testing are:
1. Cross-browser, Cross-platform, and Cross-device Testing
Modern customers have diverse usage patterns. Some might run your store on Chrome while others may use Opera, Mozilla, or Microsoft Edge. They might also be users of different operating systems like Android, iOS, Windows, or Linux. The devices can also vary from mobile to tablets to a desktop. With so many variations in the usage patterns, it becomes difficult to test your application across all the possible combinations. This is where automated testing plays a crucial role. You don’t need to test your application on every single device, browser, or platform. An automated testing tool simulates all the diverse scenarios within itself for you to test against.
2. Frequent Updates in Online Store
Online stores often go through frequent updates. Whether it is a change in the features of the application, layout of the page, or adding new products to the menu, your online store is always in the state of evolution. Manually testing them becomes time-consuming and error-prone. Through automation, you can test whether even the slightest changes in the application are working or being displayed as expected. You can also perform regression checks to ensure existing functionality is not affected due to recent changes.
3. Better Conversion Rates
Customers abandoning shopping midway is quite common. Reasons are many, but when they are due to technical glitches like the check-out button doesn’t work, the payment option doesn’t display properly, or the page doesn’t load with accurate details, it has a direct negative impact on your business. By testing all the functionalities of your website automatically at one place, at one time, you can stay assured to release an application in the market that is 100% error-free, which helps in increasing your customer conversion rate.
Key Areas of Shopify Automation Testing
While using such tools, your testing must focus on each area of your application distinctly. Below are a few tips for how you must approach different kinds of testing.
1. Cross-browser and Cross-device testing
You must use automated test scripts to test your application across multiple browsers and devices. Few tools provide you with the option of simulating all such scenarios so that you can test them all in one place.
2. Functional testing
Test all the functionalities of your application, such as:
- Page navigation must be as per the designed workflow
- Buttons like ‘add to cart’ to ‘checkout’ should work properly
- Login and account creation must be tested
- Payment gateway APIs must be checked if they are able to perform transactions securely.
3. Load testing
Your online store should be up 24×7, in all the geographical areas you are aiming to sell your products. Hence, you must perform load testing when there are bulk orders during high traffic times.
4. UI testing
After every minor update, you must ensure that the page layout is not affected – descriptions are shown correctly, buttons are loaded properly, images are at the desired locations, and so on. This is an important part of regression testing that you can perform easily through an automated tool.
Popular Automated Testing Tools
There are many automation testing tools, like testRigor, Selenium, and Cypress, available in the market today. Each of them is best suited for different scenarios and the nature of the product.Â
- testRigor provides an option to test your application without having technical expertise. All you need to do is give commands to the tool in natural language, and it will generate the test cases automatically.Â
- Selenium is another one of the most widely used test automation tools. It is an open-source framework best suited for testing web applications. But one setback with it is that it requires technical expertise to create test cases. Although it doesn’t have an in-built AI module like testRigor, it can be extended by using AI plugins.
- Cypress is a relatively new product, but it is gaining popularity fast among QA engineers and developers. It is also not AI-driven but comes with other useful features like automatic waiting and fast debugging, which reduces the manual overload.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to customer experience, your online shopping store lies at the core. Sophisticated testing methods are crucial to ensure your application works across all devices, platforms, and environments. With the ever-increasing pace of business, companies cannot afford to wait for long to release their products. They need to launch faster without compromising the quality of a shopping store. Shopify automation testing is specifically useful for such scenarios. By focusing on critical workflows to smooth navigation, automated testing is the one-stop solution for all your testing needs.
