In today’s article, I want to tackle how e-commerce sites can get ready for the holiday season.

Obviously, I have been in software development testing for 15 years, but my other title is a self-acclaimed shopaholic! I love shopping and I’ve been on numerous e-commerce sites and the challenge that I always see is that they make it very hard to get my money. I don’t have a lot of patience.

I want to share some tips on how to prepare, so your QA team or your technical team can lookout to have your e-commerce site ready for the holiday shopping season.

First, you want to make sure that your site is performing fast, meaning the response time is quick. The website needs to be mobile friendly because all of us these days are on our phones and when we receive a link and we want to go check it out right away from our phone. We want to start the shopping process right there and then from our phone. So, your website should be easy to access and respond fast.

You have to ensure that you have a quality image that you load on your website, usually, those quality images have higher resolution and it can take a lot more time to load. Your team needs to make sure that the website can load really fast. The users do not want to spend too much time loading the images to come through. Make sure that your site is easily scrollable too. Users want to quickly easily scroll and see an image fast.

Secondly, you have to make your website very user-friendly and make the experience easy for your users. Users should be able to easily and quickly find any item.

Users should be able to have a search bar on the top easily reachable where they can quickly type keywords that can easily give them more suggestions on the item that is possibly available to find.

Once the item is found, the user should be able to have a quick simple description to be able to add it to the shopping cart. The last piece is the checkout process.

The checkout process is where most companies actually lose customers. That’s where the customers get lost because your checkout processing needs to be seamless. Basically, while the user is adding items to the cart, the user should be able to see an icon in the top corner telling them how many items have been added.

Also, the total amount of the item(s) in the cart should be made seen for customers under budget constraint so these customers need to know if they need to make some trade-off right away before the checkout.

Users should also be able to easily remove item, edit and or add an item during the checkout process so that if you have any checkout coupon, you can use them. I don’t recommend them. If you have to make a coupon for checkout, make the coupon very easy to find on top as a banner where shoppers can easily copy and paste it into the coupon bar in the coupon area and quickly get a coupon. Please don’t make your coupon code something that is very difficult to type in, nor make the coupon code difficult to figure out.

The key to the checkout process is to make it secure and fast; the most crucial part of the checkout process has to do with the payment processing portion.

You want to make sure that you use already known payment providers such as Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Amazon Pay and if possible use Paypal because you want to make sure that you use a system that already has your users’ critical information like addresses.

The reason for using known payment providers mentioned above is that most shoppers do not want to have to get their card in the middle of the night and fill out the information.

Furthermore, users would be able to quickly get the confirmation right after they make the payment.

Overall your e-commerce site needs to be ready so that you can be able to get in the 1.1 trillion-dollar amount that will be spent this holiday season. You want to make it easier to get the money from millions of users that will be on your e-commerce site.

Therefore, the performance of your site is important.

It’s not just about your functional testing, but the performance of your website does also matter because the last thing you want is your website to crash when people come on your website. You have to make sure that the concurrent number of the users that can be on your website is known and you have a capability in your server and application to be able to hold that number of concurrent users.

You’re going to make sure that your checkout process is a very easy and user-friendly website where people can find items very fast.

If you have any e-commerce site that you are actively working on, please check out our services on our website and request a 30 min consultation. I should be able to review your site and give you some tips, directions, and strategies into how you can win this holiday season and make the most out of the e-commerce site.

If you have any comments or feedback or questions, leave them below and I will be happy to respond.

Thank you and enjoy your holiday shopping!