I have started with a small e-Retail website which was running all good but all of a sudden my sales were falling really fast. This was effecting my confidence in continuing the business and was also making my competitors rich. Is this a common problem faced by many e-Retail or e-Commerce entrepreneurs today? I realised that something was off and performance testing provided the answer.
Setting up a website and celebrating the opening of your new online store is not an answer to the above question. Considering becoming a real time e-Commerce entrepreneur will also not be an answer to this question. So we will discuss some facts based on this.
We will learn about some strategies on how to raise your sales, make your website stand up in the competitive world of e-commerce.
When you stare at your computer screen and wait for orders to roll in but you see that ongoing sales are coming down then that is a problem which you have to think about. To solve this problem, first you would upgrade your website with good design or with excellent content or introducing some discounts for time being. But for e-retail or e-Commerce websites, there are many more things that need to be looked into.
Performance Testing Website
No business can afford to be ignored by its web presence especially when it’s for e-Retail or e-Commerce businesses. The recent online market survey of 2015 says that online business numbers will increase by a huge margin and sales will raise to unexpected numbers when compared to the raise in the online market and sales of 2011 market. The numbers which will come up will be very huge when compared to those of 2011 market although in every quarter of 2011, the e-Commerce and e-Retail businesses have seen good raise in numbers which are spent on online trading alone. On top of this, there was a sudden outburst which the mobile market has added to this buzz as sales made on mobile devices alone in each quarter of 2011 has seen a significant raise in the numbers. So this buzz has brought about a new hope for e-Commerce and e-retail entrepreneurs that they can also withstand in the online market and reach the said numbers as per the predictions and the market strategy of 2015.
Here are some factors that online business vendors should look into:
Application Complexity
Today’s web applications are increasingly large with collective distributed software components that allow complex business services with many moving factors involved but when it comes to e-retail or e-commerce portals, one of the important factors that need to be focused on is performance issues which will directly impact the sales of the online portals. So all such factors should be monitored properly at the time of website release only. E-retail entrepreneurs should always consider these issues to be major as the share is very high when it comes to websites performance.
Application Design
One of the biggest factors impacting the performance of an application is design. When applications are designed with specified conditions, then performance goals should also be taken into consideration as they need to be defined along with the complete details of the environment the application will be running in. Often the development is left out of this as applications are monitored, examined and fixed only after they are released into the production. This process will never work good as performance of the application plays a vital role. Other important impact is the application quality which need to be built into the applications platform. Looking into the quality cannot be ignored and has to be done before.
Application Testing
Today’s applications are often developed in simulation labs without testing the application performance on real-world networks. Before applications are deployed, transport across today’s highly distributed network architectures should be monitored and optimized. Insufficient testing of the application in the actual production environment and under varying conditions impacts performance and the developers and testers need to have a clear understanding of the non-functional performance criteria.
Agile Release Cycles — the reality is that less than 5% of developers test the performance of their code before it is pushed to production. The ‘make it work’ over ‘make it perform’ mantra is one of the biggest factors that impacts application performance today. Most of the organizations don’t have the time, resources or budget to replicate production environments in test for every agile release. This is why a growing trend of customers have started to test in production out of working hours. When you consider that the code base of an application changes several times per month, you can begin to understand why performance anti-patterns and bottlenecks make their way into production.
