Quality Support And Maintenance For Smooth Running Of Your E-commerce Store

The first step to begin your e-commerce business should be with a well-designed professional layout as it represents the company on the web. Also, the look and feel of the website leave a first impression on the customers who are visiting your website for the purchase.

Now the question is, what if you do not keep a regular check on and maintain your website with the latest updates as per market?

Let’s take an example – you buy a Mac and use it for a few months. Suddenly, some maintenance requirements arise which you neglect and it leads to some problems. Obviously, you would get frustrated and stop using the device.

Exactly the same happens with your e-commerce store.

With the web world becoming an increasingly competitive place, almost every business has come up with its own website. So, to be out of the box, website maintenance and Quality check play important roles to keep the site’s details updated and also grab user attention.

Let’s see how we can maintain the Quality check on our e-commerce website –

1. Testing the main functionality of the website

• Page Layouts of the Home page, product page, category page and some important static pages like About us, privacy policy, Shipping policy, etc.
• Functionalities such as Add to cart, compare product, add to wishlist, etc.
• Basic user functionalities like add/remove the specific product from the cart, move product from wishlist to cart, Update quantity, product filters, etc.

2. Testing the overall flow of website

• Registration and Login: User should be able to register with a valid email and get an account confirmation email. With the same details, s/he should be able to log in.
• Searching and Sorting of products
• Shopping cart and Checkout process
• Payment process and Order generation: It’s important to check whether the product details like quantity, color, price etc. are correct. If any discount coupons are applied, the proper amount should be discounted. Proper invoice and emails should be sent to the customer on their respective email IDs.

3. Security and Vulnerability Testing

Since e-commerce applications have a payment feature, users’ valuable data such as banking details are stored on the website. Hence, you need to conduct some security testing like SQL injections, Penetration testing, etc. on Login, Payment and Registration pages to ensure security.

4. Cross-browser and Mobile Responsiveness Testing

A website should work in the same manner in all browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc. without any interruption. Also, as we know, in today’s world, people are more comfortable with mobile devices so we need to make sure our website design is responsive on different screen sizes as well.

Issues Arising from Lack of Website Maintenance

As we know, both Quality check and maintenance go hand-in-hand to keep the website running smoothly. Below are some issues which may happen due to lack of website maintenance:

1. You Would Start Losing Your Brand Reputation

As said earlier, a website is the first impression for the customers or the new prospects who would like to be a part of your business. If the website is not updated with your latest products, functionalities, technology, etc., customers would not be able to gain the confidence in your ability to provide advanced services to them.

2. It Will Affect the Google Search Rankings

As we all know, search engine bots love to index fresh and updated content always. You need to ensure that your website is frequently updated with trending keywords, the site should load quickly and it must be error-free. All these factors help to get your website crawled by search engines and improve its rank. If the above factors are not maintained properly, Google crawling would not be performed and thus you would end up losing online traffic.

3. You Will Start Losing Your Customers

If your website is not updated with the coupon dates and prices as per the market rate, what impression will it leave on the customers who visit your website? For example, let’s say you have applied some festive coupons (valid till a certain date) in your code and the image is represented on the banner. A customer visits the website and tries to apply the coupon code, but as it has been updated through the code, it doesn’t work. As a result, the customer would get irritated and leave the website. The same happens in the case of prices. If other websites are giving out a product at ‘X’ price and the cost in your website is ‘X+2′, he would obviously be more interested in purchasing from the other website.

I guess these points would give you a clear picture of how important these factors are for smooth running of your e-commerce store. Hope you enjoy reading this and start updating your website regularly!