{"id":1541,"date":"2016-10-06T06:51:44","date_gmt":"2016-10-06T12:51:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cigniti.com\/blog\/?p=1541"},"modified":"2024-09-06T15:36:59","modified_gmt":"2024-09-06T10:06:59","slug":"multiple-dimensions-performance-testing-e-commerce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cigniti.com\/blog\/multiple-dimensions-performance-testing-e-commerce\/","title":{"rendered":"The Multiple Dimensions of Performance Testing In E-Commerce"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year, Flipkart, India\u2019s largest E-Commerce company, briefly encountered issues yet again as its Big Billion Day sale progressed. The payment gateway was down, albeit briefly, and consumers could not finalize their purchases. One year ago, in its attempt to limit access only via the mobile application, Flipkart\u2019s sale began with application crashes due to unknown reasons. Two years ago, on the day of the Big Billion Day sale, Flipkart\u2019s customers could not properly access the website due to slow server access<\/a>. Read our blog post<\/a> explaining the issue.<\/p>\n

All websites, big or small, have downtime, and there are disruptions, however negligible. Be it payment gateway downtime, app crashes or server issues, the fact of the matter is, when the load gets heavy or the traffic is pouring in, website applications and mobile applications tend to face severe performance issues. How websites prepare for such mishaps and their general up-time is what varies.<\/p>\n

Performance testing and monitoring helps derive insights to improve the overall performance. <\/strong><\/p>\n

E-commerce plays a huge role in the daily lifestyle of its customers. Shopping is nowadays seldom about intended purchase and is all the more about customer experience. Convenience and variety are a major part of the said customer experience. According to a report released by Forrester a few years ago, the growth rates of rapidly growing mature e-commerce markets of China and India were predicted to be 25% and 57%, respectively, by the end of 2016.<\/p>\n

The Forrester report titled, \u201cTRENDS IN INDIA\u2019S E-COMMERCE MARKET\u201d which was published in August 2012, talks about how the trend of online shopping is catching fast, and how many upper- and middle-class consumers are looking to avail the benefits of online grocery shopping. The report goes on to further add that, while large retailers are looking to build a dominating online presence, consumers have a specific set of expectations. In order to deal with the expectations, localization would be key. One of the localization factors was payment options. The report points out that, while online payments were then only beginning to gain popularity, failure and inconsistencies of payment gateways still amounted to a staggering 35% failure rate. A collaborative effort would help customers avail alternate payment methods, therefore allowing them to complete their purchase. This would help the E-Commerce company generate more revenue, and would greatly help them hold on to their first-time consumers.<\/p>\n

Some might still say that downtime may be good news for any e-commerce company. It indicates incredible accomplishment in charming the customers and stakeholders including vendors, back-end IT teams and marketing units. This is a sign that the business is heading in the right direction. Only, the performance of the IT systems has to be continually reinforced to match the \u2018difficult to predict\u2019 user activity.<\/p>\n

Fail Safe Performance Testing has become a mandate for any business environment that succeeds during heavy volume transactions around-the-clock, or during peak seasons. It is palpable that the demand for a dependable and exceedingly scalable system is growing exponentially for IT driven verticals. Adding to this, customers are now less tolerant and excessively vocal on social networks by sharing poor buying experience with screenshots and enraged reviews. Naturally, this has a huge impact on the brand reputation and the perceived quality of the product.<\/p>\n

Performance testing undertakes multiple dimensions in E-commerce. Performance testing should be done in a layered approach that is manageable and at the same time, delivers a comprehensive coverage in the case of such a complex system. Big distributed systems cannot be fully tested on a UAT environment. There are numerous stages of testing spanning over a range of resources, speeds, and fidelity to a production system. For example, a typical large system might consist of thousands of various servers,
\nfront-end website applications, API servers, internal services, and various databases. Such systems might process quite a few terabytes of data daily, and their storage is measured in petabytes. They are constantly hit by innumerable clients and users. It is challenging to reproduce all this on a UAT environment.<\/p>\n

Large-scale distributed systems are ever-prevalent due to the development of social networks and web applications. Testing of large-scale distributed systems is not particularly straight-forward, as there is much more testing, beyond the traditional testing methods. Realistic usage patterns and extreme loads are essential to get accurate results.<\/p>\n

Traditionally, the performance testing approach usually follows the following procedure:<\/p>\n