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Is web testing included in your re-platforming budget?

Posted by Dan Berry on Friday 21 July 2017

Sales in the UK online retail market are growing by 15.9% every year. A key driving force behind this growth is the mobile market, with mobile sales increasing 47% year-on-year at the end of 2016. This increase highlights the changing landscape of online retail, and how necessary it is to have a platform ready for mobile sales. If your ecommerce platform is unable to adapt to the evolving needs of the online retail space, you’ll need to re-examine your offerings and goals to find a solution.

One answer to this problem is re-platforming, but this can be a difficult process, especially when the business may have spent hundreds of thousands securing search engine positions, refining their AdWords PPC strategies, developing long term content marketing strategies and refining the customer experience at transaction stage. Before you dive in, you might ask yourself if it’s better to fix your current ecommerce platform, or whether the money for re-platforming could have a better ROI elsewhere. Questions like this are necessary, as it’s important to identify whether re-platforming is an effective strategy for your organisation. If you do choose to go ahead with re-platforming, any associated costs should be viewed as an investment to help achieve the company’s goals.

Once you’ve decided that re-platforming is the best solution, the question of testing will arise. What type of testing is necessary? What are the benefits? This is often an afterthought in the enormity of a re-platforming programme, here are five reasons why web testing should be a top priority and needs to be included in your re-platforming budget.

Web testing can save you money post-migration

Re-platforming can cause technical issues that have a negative impact on both your new and established customers, resulting in lost sales. Web testing can prevent or minimise the loss of sales by dealing with technical difficulties before they affect your customers both pre-launch and post launch.

Web testing improves the customer journey

Under ideal circumstances, no one would notice when you re-platform, but the re-platforming process will always cause some problems for your customers.  UK based retailer Marks and Spencer was one company that didn’t adequately prepare for re-platforming, and their sales and brand suffered as a result. Their re-platforming issues caused losses for the company and a backlash from their customer base. Marks and Spencer could have avoided many of these problems with thorough functional testing. Including web testing in your re-platforming budget ensures a smoother launch, improves your customer’s journey and increases your revenue. Web testing provides improved credibility for your business

Web testing offers increased credibility for your business by ensuring your customers experience fewer technical difficulties with your newly re-platformed site. Two critical parts of your site that need to be running smoothly to protect your credibility are the checkout and payment gateway. Ensuring critical elements of your site are stable during re-platforming will help you be more certain customers will continue to shop with you instead of switching to the competition.

Web testing offers peace of mind

The issues that can arise during re-platforming, such as broken links or missing images, can be amplified across multiple devices and cause you a lot of stress. Web testing will help you identify these problems on the new platform before they affect your customers.

Frees up your technical team

Your technical team will be under immense pressure during the re-platforming process, and you don’t want to burden them with the additional load of web testing. New methodologies such as on demand crowdsourced web testing providers can be hired to perform the necessary volume and quality of testing to guarantee all mobile devices and locations are covered, ensuring your technical team is able to focus on fixing issues during re-platforming, rather than finding them!

These web testing benefits can help you eliminate or minimise any of the issues that arise from re-platforming, which is why it’s vital to include it in your re-platforming budget. For more information on the benefits of web testing and how to revolutionise your web testing process, be sure to download our latest eBook now.