Big retailers have been planning ahead for up to 18 months for their share of approximately 2.6 billion dollars of revenue. Cyber Monday started in 2005 by Shop.org has become one of the biggest online traffic days of the year, Simon Puleo takes a look at the list of how some of our biggest customers have prepared.
‘Twas the night before Cyber Monday and all through the house
everyone was using touchscreens gone was the mouse.
While consumers checked their wish lists with care
in hopes that great savings soon would be there.
The children were watching screens in their beds
while visions of Pikachu danced in their heads.
And Mamma in her robe and I in my Cub’s hat
reviewed our bank accounts and decided that was that!’
Cyber Monday started in 2005 by Shop.org has become one of the biggest online traffic days of the year. Black Friday may have started as early as 1951 and between the two shopping holidays generate over $70 BN! Let’s take a look at the list of how some of our biggest customers have prepared:
1.) Performance testing. Did you know that our customers typically start performance testing for cyber-Monday in February, why would they start so early? Customers are testing more than just peak load, they are testing that sites will render correctly across multiple configurations, bandwidths, devices, and sometimes in multiple regions of the world. The goals of ecommerce is to enable as many shoppers as possible that includes my Dad on his iPad 2 on a rural carrier and my daughter on her Chromebook in an urban area. Multiply that by thousands of users and you can see that unfortunately, retailers can’t hire enough of my relatives to help them out. What they do is use a combination of synthetic monitors and virtual users to simulate and assess how a website will perform when 10,000 of users are shopping at the same time.
2.) New Feature Testing. Whether you consciously think about it or not you expect and gravitate towards websites that have the latest feature set and best user experience. What does that mean? Listing a photo and description is bare bones the best commerce websites not only have reviews, videos, links to social media and wish lists they may actually be responsive to your shopping habits, regional weather and personal interests. They use big data sets to preclude what you are browsing for and offer you targeted deals too good to pass up! While that is exciting, it also means that the complexity of code both rendering the browser and behind the scenes has grown exponentially over the years. Ensuring that new features perform and old code works with legacy systems as well renders correctly over multiple devices is what functional and regression testing is all about. While a team of testers may track multiple code changes they lean towards automation to ensure that code works on target configurations.
3.) Offering Federated Access Management What? you’re thinking, user-login was solved ages ago. For sophisticated online retailers using Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Twitter, LinkedIn or other credentials to gain access is first a method to gain trust, second opens up the potential opportunity for more customers and finally a road to valuable personal data. Regardless of which advantage a retailer may prioritize developing the ability to enable millions of Facebook users to easily login and check-out with a credit-card equates to new customers and a leg up over legacy competitors. And, for added amount of trust and security retailers can couple multi-factor authentication at key points of the conversion process. Simple user login and password for each shopping site is quickly becoming a relic of the past as users opt for convenience over management of many user names and passwords.
These are some of the top methods and solutions that big retailers have implemented for 2016. The best online commerce professionals know what they are up against and what is at stake for example:
- In 2014 there were over 18,000 different Android devices on the market according to OpenSignal, that is an overwhelming amount of devices to ensure.
- At a minimum retailers lose $5600 per minute their websites are down
- The market is huge a recent estimate put the global amount of digital buyers at 1.6 Billion, that is nearly 1/5 of the world’s population. Converting even .1% of that number is 160,000 users!
- Users are fickle and will leave a website if delayed just a few seconds
- Last year Cyber Monday accounted for $3 billion in revenue, this year we expect even more!
Retailers like Mueller in Germany realize that no “downtime” is critical to keeping both the online and virtual shelving stocked. Their holistic approach to managing software testing and performance helps them implement new features while keeping existing systems up and running. It is never too late to get started for this year or preparing for next, consider how Micro Focus has helped major US and European Online Retailers with performance testing, automated functional and regression testing, access management and advanced authentication.
