In today’s ‘digital- first’ retail landscape, retailers’ websites or their mobile apps are their storefront and data is their currency. So for retailers, digital resilience needs be a number one priority. This has been tested recently – in the autumn, retailers like M&S and the Co-op were victims of protracted campaigns of cyber hostage-taking, resulting in digital outages for long periods of time. The hacking incidents exposed serious vulnerabilities in retail digital infrastructure and data management. And it is not just cyber-attacks – these weaknesses can cause other problems.
Periods of high traffic, like the current January sales or the recent Black Friday and Cyber Monday events, where customers swarm online to get the latest deals, can lead to slow load times or outages. Customer experiences – like checkout page freeze, baskets emptying mid-transaction or sales going completely offline – are common during periods of high demand. And these issues frustrate customers – every delay increases bounce rates and lowers conversion. Google reckons that if a page load time goes from one second to five, bounce rates soar to 90%.
Why do these problems happen? Look at quality and testing
Technology glitches often come down to impairments in software testing and quality assurance (QA). But it’s an area often overlooked by retailers. One reason is the pressure around fast release cycles – the race to deploy new features or promotions means QA is de-prioritised. Legacy systems are another issue – retailers are often constrained by tech that isn’t designed to integrate seamlessly with newer, cloud native applications. Siloed teams are another sticking point – this can prevent a consistent and unified development, test and release process for systems and applications. For example, a front-end customer-facing application may be tested, but its integration to payment gateways or APIs might not have been. Inadequate backend scalability can cause issues in inventory systems, payment processing and recommendations if they are not properly load tested. The entire retail operation can suffer. QA and testing often focus on the wrong process, typically caused by ambiguous requirements and faulty processes – and this is where vulnerabilities creep in.
Brand reputation down the drain
Inconsistent or broken digital experiences reduce customer trust and loyalty – a customer who abandons a shopping cart during a failed transaction might never come back. This can lead to drops in revenue, market share and competitive clout. So, what can be done to prevent this from happening?
Building testing into the retail DNA
Retailers need to rethink their approach to QA and testing. Priority one is to implement a QA and testing strategy to provide a consistent approach in assessing the change. Here are some key components retailers need to build a robust strategy:
- Undertake static testing: static testing helps identify defects and ambiguities in design and requirements before the build even commences, which can save time and money.
- Ensure metrics and defect root causes are documented: this assists planning and estimation and helps avoid recurring issues. Learning from mistakes is a valuable lesson, not a process to assign blame – it enables the iterative improvement of the system. This isn’t just an end-of-project activity but can be undertaken during the delivery of any change.
- Consider continuous performance testing: it is important to shift from one-off tests before big events to regular, automated performance testing. It is vital to execute automated performance tests for business-‘critical’ functions on a regular basis. This can be more costly, but the strategy and risk approach will provide guidance on the type and frequency of any testing that is required.
- Simulate real-world load scenarios: use tools which can simulate thousands, or even millions, of concurrent users across different geographies, devices, and bandwidths. It is important to model peak traffic scenarios on historical data – learning from past events, like Christmas, flash sales or influencer campaigns can help retailers future-proof events coming down the track. The load scenarios should consider concurrency of existing network traffic, not just that of the specific change.
- Identify critical end-to-end journeys: this ensures that testing reflects actual customer journeys – from browsing, filtering and selecting, to paying and receiving confirmation. It is also vital to include dependencies on third-party suppliers – such as payment providers, logistics and APIs – to test for bottlenecks.
- Involve the whole business: to help avoid a ‘siloed’ approach, involve the whole business and all teams, including vendors and suppliers of outsourced services where relevant. Collaboration across IT, operations, customer services, marketing, B&M, etc., will ensure that testing aligns with business priorities and that there are no surprises. It is critical to ensure non-functional requirements are defined, agreed and risk assessed, given the heightened threat levels retailers now face. Early involvement with business users assists with the ultimate business adoption of any change.
- Investing in real time monitoring: implementing APM (application performance monitoring) can provide performance metrics and set up and trap alerts to flag performance degradation before customers become aware. This enables a quick fix, provided the application support process is well defined and understood. It is key to flag any system degradation, but if you do not know who can fix it, the alerting becomes redundant.
- Disaster recovery and business continuity planning: with the ever-changing threat profiles to business, it is prudent to review your existing plans and confirm they are fit for purpose. The plans should cover people, communication, business operation and process in addition to technical switching.
Retailers who treat QA and software testing as an afterthought do so at their peril. As customer expectations grow and the digital battleground intensifies, performance and security are not just technical concerns. It is a commercial imperative. And if retailers risk exposing customer data, it can be a legal imperative too. By embedding robust testing into development workflows and aligning it with business goals, retailers can ensure their digital storefront is always open, always fast, and always trusted – and their systems, reputation and customer data are always safe.
Valcon’s testing practice collaborates with retailers to strengthen their testing and quality assurance in-house capability to help them mitigate these risks. If you would like to talk about how building your testing capability can improve your overall digital performance, please reach out to Steve Nicklin.
