Testing of Retail Applications

Testing retail applications is tricky as it requires a complex ecosystem demanding synchronization of various components like e-commerce, payment gateways, product management, inventory management, PoS etc. To ensure the app behaves as expected in the system and all the functions perform well, it should be tested well.

Retail technology has emerged immensely in the last decade with the emergence of digitization and increasing usage of mobile devices and internet. Technological evolution has given rise to changing customer behavior allowing organizations to invest heavily in creating retail apps to attract more users. The trend of retail apps dominates today’s world with people preferring shopping apps over their brick-and-motor counterpart. Unlike other sectors, the retail app landscape is highly diverse and complex. To ensure each element in the system delivers expected outcomes and provides a seamless user experience, test automation solution becomes inevitable.

Tenjin Online has been designed to test the complexities and dynamic nature of retail apps. It has been tried and tested over a wide range of popular retail apps in the market and has been successful every time. It can easily navigate through the retail systems like ERP, PoS, CRM, warehouse channeling, supply changing management systems etc., and test the app screen by screen to check for any glitches. This is one of the reliable testing tools for web, Android, and iOS applications.

Why Testing is Important for Retail Applications?

The retail market is changing at a faster rate with the introduction of modern solutions to create omnichannel experience. This has given rise to developing advanced retail software that supports multiple systems in one single platform. Moreover, there is an increasing number of users who prefer retail applications. To cater to the growing sector, organizations are coming up with innovative, use-to-use apps that offer seamless user experience. The key to success of the retail app lies in testing it to ensure the quality is high.

The retail market is growing rapidly and getting highly competitive, especially its online counterpart. Though there are a major proportion of customers who prefer visiting the store for purchase, the craze of online retail is increasing quickly for the ease, convenience, and the exuberant offers it provides. This trend has revolutionized the online shopping process, witnessing a huge shift from offline shopping to online shopping. The digital trend is making testing services mandatory to ensure the app is working as expected and engages the customers with a flawless performance.

Testing of retail apps ensures the following:

• Earlier defect identification
• Quicker deployment
• Greater test coverage
• Improved customer experience
• Better performance and sustainability
• Cost saving and faster market release
• Drive improved ROI
• Create better business models

Retails apps are integrated with multiple software to serve all the needs it demands. This ecosystem is prone to errors due to its complex nature. There may be errors arising due to defects in any software individually, or deviation from expected behavior in the combined environment. Hence, retail businesses are ensuring to test the apps thoroughly and fix all the glitches before market release. Testing eliminates any defect in the app and ensures to offer a seamless user experience.

Retail Digital Landscape

The digital business landscape is continuously evolving and subjected to various changes, especially post COVID-19 pandemic. The transformation is reshaping the retail sector, giving rise to the era of e-commerce evolution. Customer expectations are shifting towards app-centric purchases that offer immense ease, comfort, option, discounts, and a lot. The retail app landscape is changing to align with changing customer preferences, customer demographics, increasing urbanization, and the concept of omni channelization. In order to ensure the app is performing well across all the retail features, it is subjected to extensive testing.

The retail apps are used by a wider demographic, but the number of younger crowd is more. They prefer the online platforms over brick-and-motor options for easy shopping experience, varied options, quick payments, no waiting time, comfort, and a lot more. To get all these covered, the app should meet the functionality needs, perform as expected, and let the user enjoy the overall process.

To ensure the customers engage, enjoy, and re-visit the app, the following considerations should be made:

• Functionality needs are met
• Smooth usability and accessibility
• Lower loading time and no app crashes
• Seamless integration of payment gateways
• High loading time
• Efficient regression testing
• Security standards are met

Retail Application Software

The retail segment is dynamic and has specialized software for billing, ordering, delivery, accounting, fund management, and inventory management. Some of the popular retail software includes:

ERP: ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system is a platform with combined software for easy and accurate data flow. It improves the efficiency of the process and creates positive business impacts. It touches the critical areas of retail sector like service/product delivery, cost planning, inventory management, payment tracking, shipping details management, and planning sales and marketing activities. It becomes important to test the ERP system to ensure all the critical functionality and integrations are working as expected.

PoS: PoS (Point of Sale) Software is used by retail organizations to process customer transactions, accept payments, fund management, product returns, and update inventory. PoS is popularly used by retail organizations to streamline their day-to-day operations and record sales data. Any defect in the PoS can cause error in the sales data effecting the process. Hence, it is of immense significance to test the PoS system to ensure effective operations.

CRM: CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Software helps organizations manage individual customers in real-time, helping streamline process better and allow customers experience a great service. CRM system testing is inevitable to manage better customer relationship and associated with business returns.

Conclusion

The retail segment is highly dynamic and requires a different testing approach than apps of other categories. Further, they are associated with sensitive features like payment gateways and users’ bank details. It is critical to thoroughly test the app end-to-end to ensure there are no glitches and offers a seamless user experience; hence, testing retail apps are extremely important. Tenjin Online is designed to test the complex functionality and UI of retail apps. It has been tested over more than 250 app categories with a good number of retail apps. Tenjin Online is a simple, efficient, 5th-generation, codeless, self-assisted test automation platform for web, Android, and iOS apps. For further queries or scheduling a demo, write to us – hello@tenjinonline.com.