Ecommerce has surged as more and more shoppers look online for the things they want. If you run an ecommerce website, you know how important uptime, reliability, and performance are to your business. Losing even one customer to a slow or unresponsive website hurts your revenue and reputation, and can have downstream effects for years to come if numerous users leave your website and go to a competitor.

There is a solution. If you run an ecommerce website, you need to regularly stress test it so you and your developers can get ahead of potential issues and give your users the best possible experience. Let’s take a look at how.

stress test ecommerce

What Stress Testing Is

The ultimate goal of stress testing is to provide you peace of mind when you think about your website’s reliability and stability. A stress test gives you the information you need to allow your website to stay active and performative, even under severe conditions.

Stress testing is also known as endurance testing, and rightfully so. By stress testing, you get a better understanding of your website’s capacity to entertain a large number of users. By putting your website under abnormally high, artificial load, you learn its breaking point–essentially, the point at which your website doesn’t perform at an acceptable level. This is why regular stress testing is essential, as it gives you an ongoing sense of how the site can handle a surge in traffic, which of course can happen at any time.

 

Goals You Can Accomplish With Stress Testing

With proper stress testing, you can plan for the expected and unexpected alike. One common concern for ecommerce website owners is of course Black Friday, when traffic surges. A slow-performing website on Black Friday can spell disaster for an online retailer.

And what if your website has crashed? Stress testing will allow you and your team to reverse engineer the situation and identify precisely where the site began to fail, giving you invaluable insight into how to make adjustments and prepare for future traffic. You’ll also be able to see how quickly your website recovers in the case of failure.

Recoverability, thus, becomes an important facet of any website. It should be able to recover from its failure.

 

What to Look for During a Stress Testing

Here are a few key factors to consider during stress testing. When in doubt, speak to one of our experts at LoadView for support and guidance.

 

User Pathways

User pathways that begin at registration and end at checkout and payment will vary according to user taste. So, it becomes necessary to chart different pathways users might take and to focus on certain elements that you think people will do more of. This will help you project and make critical assumptions about user behavior, and your stress testing endeavors will give you accurate results.

 

Cookies

Your browser stores information through cookies. Cookies help eliminate repeated prompts for the user to enter their information. A prompt might only take the user’s attention once, and relay the information across web pages so your customer doesn’t have to enter information again and again. The information stored on these cookies may falter under severe load conditions. It’s helpful here to stress test enough to see at what point the website will start to behave abnormally, and to make adjustments per the information you receive from the test.

 

Payment Section

Payments are the most exciting factor if you’re an ecommerce business owner. Keep in mind that this is the most exciting element for users as well. Whether you have your own payment system or you use third party software, it’s useful to have a stress test that can simulate multiple simultaneous users on your payment page. A fast website is not much use if checkouts won’t process at scale during a big sale or event like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

 

Managing Your Inventory

Managing an inventory can sometimes be hard, especially considering the pace at which things sell during high-paced sales events. You may have 200 units of a certain product, but the system might display 250, which causes confusion and frustration amongst users when they’re not able to buy the product they want. Stress testing can help identify if this is an issue so you and your developers can take action.

 

Some Stress Testing Best Practices

When stress testing, here are a few things you’ll want to do.

  • Create user pathways for less common interactions, such as emptying cart, clicking the back button, or adding coupons.
  • Have the most realistic conditions possible for stress testing by including real browsers people use.
  • Try to access your website from all kinds of devices and browsers.
  • Stress tests from different places in the world.

LoadView leads the industry in each of the above areas, giving you the most accurate possible results. Our expert team is available to support your stress and load testing goals for websites and applications, and of course ecommerce. We’ll help you maximize your load testing budget and help you and your developers ensure your websites remain performative even on the busiest days.

 

Stress Testing With LoadView

At LoadView, we offer a wide variety of tools with which you can put your website through testing conditions, including of course stress testing. If you’re looking for the right stress testing tool for your website, look no further, because we’ve designed LoadView to assist with complex ecommerce websites.

We offer a number of functions to help you gain the best possible insights into the performance of your ecommerce website under load. Here are a few of the ways LoadView stands out from the competition:

  • With our EveryStep Recorder, you can create complex scripts to simulate real user behavior by simply pointing and clicking as a user would. This allows you to generate complex testing scripts in minutes without technical knowledge of scripting languages. Simply simulate the user behavior you’d like to record as you would in a regular browser, and our helpful tool writes a complex script for you – no technical knowledge required.
  • LoadView uses different web browsers and devices to simulate real life situations, so you can get an accurate picture of how your ecommerce website performs for various users. This will help you and your developers improve it for everyone, not just those with the latest and fastest devices.
  • With LoadView you can test your website from multiple touch points across the globe. This way, you’ll know performance levels determined by location. If your ecommerce website works great in New York but not Los Angeles, you could be losing revenue. LoadView will help you solve this issue.
  • LoadView’s detailed, accurate analysis and reporting is clean and ready to turn into actionable insights for developers. You don’t need to be a highly technical user to be able to make the most out of LoadView.

 

stress test ecommerce

Use LoadView to Stress Test Your Ecommerce Website

There are several areas of focus when considering testing your ecommerce website. These include the reliability, scalability, and speed of your website. If you want your users to have the best experience possible, it’s necessary to test regularly and to keep fixing bugs and performance issues that may arise. To get a real sense of how your website might behave under severe stress, it’s important to use real users and real browser, which LoadView supports.

Sign up for a free trial with LoadView today and start testing in minutes. Our experts are here to support you to get the most out of your load testing budget and ecommerce websites.