eCommerce, consumers have all the power—and it only takes one critical defect to send them off to a competitor. With the stakes that high, poor software testing isn’t simply a concern—it can thrust the entire company’s future into uncertainty.
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A whopping 89 percent of online customers will engage a competitor following a poor service experience. |
There’s no question about it: the stakes have never been higher for online retailers.
As the $350 billion industry continues its ascendant growth, competition reigns supreme. A decade ago, the field was limited to a few niche players. Nowadays, everyone and their brother has an online retail presence—and they’re all vying for the same pool of consumers.
And with that kind of cutthroat competition, differentiation means everything.
With brick-and-mortar stores, retailers would typically have a couple methods of doing so: sell at the lowest-possible price, or aim for higher-quality customer service. In the eCommerce world, the former is still a viable option—but in the absence of in-person service, online retailers have had to set their sights on new facets of the evolving customer experience. And while traditional customer service will always be a priority (it’s just evolved into email responsiveness and live chat boxes), eCommerce companies have expanded into completely new territory: the quality (and testing) of their software systems.
This shouldn’t come as too much of a shock—especially in an industry that relies almost completely upon software to deliver quality service experiences. Whether it’s customer facing (like a mobile-friendly website or app) or not (like a POS/inventory management system), users are interacting with software systems every step of the way—from browsing to checkout.
And when it comes to what they expect out of that software, users have made their expectations explicitly clear. Whether it’s a shopping cart that’s slow to update, a mobile app that crashes midway into checkout, or any one of a million other software defects that can impede their progress, every software failure is a make-or-break situation.
That’s not hyperbole, either. In fact, a recent study indicated that a whopping 89 percent of online customers will engage a competitor following a poor service experience. In this industry, if you’re not committed to thoroughly testing every one of your software systems, you’re falling behind.
Fueling the competition isn’t the only problem that a lack of software testing can cause, either. They can also start to seriously impact your brand identity too. That’s why it’s sometimes better to delay a release to get it right—even if it comes at the expense of missing lucrative holiday seasons. Heck, we even had one client who missed the entire Christmas season because they didn’t want the negative publicity of a poor-quality release.
The reason they made that choice? Not wanting to fall behind the competition.
I know that some of this might come off as over-the-top, but take a second and think about your own experience with eCommerce. When you’re looking to purchase something, how stringent are your own expectations? How likely are you to suffer through one site’s issues when there are a handful of others out there that sell the same items for the same price?
You’d look elsewhere, right? That’s all an online retailer needs to know.
Cheers,
Mike Hodge
Lighthouse Technologies, Inc.
Software Testing | Quality Assurance Consulting | Oracle EBS Consulting
