Tips for Shopping Apps This Holiday Season

Gone are the days when the majority of your customers stood outside the store eagerly waiting for the doors to open, only to rush in and grab all they need (and don’t need) during the holiday shopping season. As per eMarketer, 2022 witnessed 214.7 million online shoppers in the US with an average spending of $4,892 per person, and experts forecast that e-commerce shoppers will rise to around 218.8 million in the States. Cyber Monday turned out to be the online shopping day with the highest e-commerce conversion rate in US history during this holiday season in 2022, amounting to 10.7 billion US dollars. This was followed by Black Friday, as per Adobe's report.

We at HeadSpin love seamless mobile experiences and great deals, and have put together a wishlist for our favorite shopping apps:

1.) One size doesn’t fit all –

• Test your app/website on all top devices in the market across Android, iOS and browsers in the real world. Your user may not always be accessing your products in the comfort of their home with uninterrupted WiFi, so account for all real-world conditions.

• Don’t download images larger than the device resolution. This puts the burden on the client-side to download a bigger asset and resize it as well.
• Consider having a server-side ability to configure height and width of images via the URL parameters.
• Perform lossless image compression on PNG and JPEG images. Consider using the WEBP image format, which provides great compression and image quality

Perfect digital experiences with HeadSpin’s retail application testing solution. Learn more!

2.) Your users like shopping directly from you, so make sure all traffic is encrypted to avoid MITM (Man in The Middle) attacks – everything should be TLS.

3.) No one likes waiting around when there’s a good sale. Any instances of low page content over 2 seconds should be eliminated in order to increase user engagement.

Flipkart was able to detect and fix performance bottlenecks in their code base and prevented two serious performance regressions from going live to millions of users. Using NimbleDroid, a HeadSpin company, Flipkart was able to pinpoint the issue and the app startup time was reduced by 45%.

4.) Your user is unlikely to buy the same outfit 10 times. Same goes for downloading duplicate content. Avoid instances of duplicate messages which indicate that the client received and downloaded the same resources multiple times.

5.) Bring cache only. Products images that are not seasonal or promotional should be cached on your CDN.

According to author & humorist Erma Bombeck, the odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.

Your user is gearing up for your holiday sales, so check out HeadSpin to put your best mobile experience forward!

Read: Why to Consider Digital Experience Monitoring Strategy

FAQs

1. Why is it essential for firms to improve customers’ app-based shopping experiences? 

Ans: According to Statista, the total revenue in the app market is expected to register a CAGR of 6.58% during 2022-2026, resulting in a projected market volume of USD 542.80 billion by 2026. User experience is a key factor for e-commerce applications to cash in on this projected growth. Thus, it becomes essential to eliminate UI and UX inconsistencies across the app through testing and development to decrease the cart abandonment and app drop-off rates.

Also read: A Complete Guide to User Interface Testing

‍2. What are the critical features of a shopping app that need functional testing?

Ans: The critical features of a shopping app that need functional testing are login systems, search and filter, search result pages, order detail page, shopping cart, deals and promo codes, order confirmation page, and order tracking.

‍3. What are the various types of performance testing used to test shopping apps?

Ans: Load testing, stress testing, volume testing, scalability testing, and spike testing.

4. What are the three crucial features of the HeadSpin Platform for testing shopping apps?

Ans: Performance optimization of shopping apps leads to better user experiences. Key mobile app performance testing tools offered by HeadSpin enable companies to achieve better outcomes and higher revenue through their shopping apps. The three essential features of the HeadSpin platform for testing mobile apps are:

• Visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the quality of experience
• Ability to conduct tests on any device and OS
• Capability for rapid issue detection using artificial intelligence (AI)