#30daysofecommercetesting

30 Days of Testing is an ongoing series of regular challenges based on various themes within software testing. The topic for this month: ecommerce. This challenge was hosted by the good folks over at Ministry of Testing and sponsored by Sauce Labs.

As this challenge has come to a close, I take a look back and reflect on what I’ve gleaned from learning about a new subject matter over the course of 30 days:

Understand the basics

Throughout this challenge, there were some topics and terms I vaguely knew about. I took that as an opportunity to peel it back and get a general sense of the fundamentals to help contextualize my understanding. It doesn’t hurt to take a moment to go back to basics and get a grasp of the fundamentals before taking a deeper dive into the specifics and advanced stuff. Don’t cut corners!

Unpack the questions 

There were a variety of questions I encountered during this challenge: hypotheticals, definitions, research missions... at times, I noticed I would get so engrossed in the ‘what’, that I would lose sight of the ‘why’. When learning about a new topic, understand what the question is really asking, and identify what the key learning outcomes are. Only then can you start to find value in the information you are consuming.

Engage with others 

Learning is (more) fun with friends! Getting your thoughts and opinions out there, while commenting on and questioning others, will challenge your own thinking/bias, expose you to other approaches, and elevate your thinking overall.

Make it challenging 

No real growth happens within your comfort zone. Going into this challenge, there were aspects of ecommerce I was familiar with, and things I was not. Even with the questions, I found that some seemed quick and easy that I felt I needed to abstract it or deviate from the original exercise slightly in order to make the task at hand just the right amount of challenging.

Make it fun 

Learning, without a hint of gamification, can sometimes be a little bland and vanilla. Find little ways to make what you’re learning that much more enjoyable and dare I say it, ‘fun’, for you. For me, it was infusing Emojis in my posts, and hunting for a contextually relevant GIF or animation to accompany my posts.

Apply yourself

Knowledge *only when applied* is power... Ultimately, the true test of demonstrating your newly acquired knowledge is finding ways to apply your learnings to real life, relevant applications. How can you apply what you’ve learned today? in your current job/role? your current project? Learn, apply, and learn from that. Always be learning!

ICYMI, here’s another look at the daily missions for this challenge. 

Find 4 different types of credit cards; learn what makes them different.

I had a bit of a double motive going into this learning exercise. They say millennials don’t have enough personal finance literacy, so I particularly enjoyed today’s topic around discovering the different types of CCs, the benefits they provide, and who they cater to. Thanks to an easy-to-follow breakdown by The Balance (a resource I encountered on Day 23), and NASDAQ which I guess is a legitimate resource on the subject matter 😏.

💳 Standard CCs aka “Plain Vanilla”

You might choose this type of credit card if you want a card that isn't complicated and you're not interested in earning rewards. Credit is used up when you make a purchase and made available again once you've made a payment. A finance charge is applied to outstanding balances at the end of each month. 

💰 Rewards CCs

Offer rewards on credit card purchases. There are three basic types of rewards cards: cashback, points, and travel. 

Source: https://www.thebalance.com/types-of-credit-cards-960255

🛠 Bad credit and/or credit repair cards

There are several options available to those who have had bad credit in the past and for those who are currently trying to repair their credit.

🌟 Specialty CCs

For consumers with unique needs for their credit use, such as business professionals and students. These credit card programs are designed specifically to meet the needs of those individuals.

Source: https://www.nasdaq.com/personal-finance/credit-card-types.stm

Research how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and ecommerce work together.

Shopify on what SEO is and why it matters in ecommerce:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of generating more organic (i.e. free, natural) traffic from sites like Google, Bing and Yahoo... Ecommerce SEO is all about ensuring your product pages appear among those ten organic search results.

Essentially, SEO tactics help ecommerce companies and their products index high in search results for better discoverability - both across the web, and within the ecommerce site itself. You can’t sell stuff if people never see your stuff in the first place.

Knowing what your audience is actively searching for (keyword research) and optimizing your site structure in a way that makes your ranking in the eyes of search engines high is key.

tl;dr “Basically, you want to make it easy for actual visitors and search engines to find stuff in your store.”

There are a number of techniques and tools you can use to help make your ecommerce site SEO friendly. It also helps that many of the leading ecommerce platforms (such as Shopify) already have built-in SEO features to help make things easier.

Resource: https://www.shopify.ca/blog/ecommerce-seo-beginners-guide

Identify potential ethical issues with the use of ecommerce data. What are some public examples?

Ethical Issues

Came across this excellent resource outlining various types of ethical issues and how you can avoid them. I’ve curated the key points from 3 of varying degrees:

Failing to put up accurate product details

eCommerce is different from traditional retail. Your customers cannot touch the product they will buy. eCommerce customers don’t get to see the exact item they’ll receive. Therefore, it’s important that you make the effort to list your products accurately, completely, and honestly.

Data theft & security breaches

Hackers can do a lot of damage to your customers with [sensitive] information such as:

Credit card numbers

Personal information, like their address

Email addresses and a password, which they may share across many accounts

Purchase history (particularly important if you sell sensitive products)

Selling fake products

You need to take action to ensure you sell authentic products. You’ll get the blame if the customer finds out. (Oh yeah, it’s illegal too!)

Not abiding by online selling laws and regulations

Data compliance and privacy laws

Tax regulations (think about selling across state and national borders)

Online marketing laws like the CAN-SPAM act and laws about advertising disclosure

International regulations, like those in the European Union

Product-specific regulations (for example, you can’t sell alcohol to customers under 21)

Resource: https://www.nchannel.com/blog/ethical-issues-in-ecommerce/

Public Examples

The ones I’m most familiar with are to do with abysmal data/security breaches. Some from the hall of shame:

eBay

The breach at eBay Inc was poised to be one of the biggest data breaches in history, based on the number of accounts compromised. Around 145 million records were accessed by hackers that contained passwords as well as email addresses, birth dates, mailing addresses and other personal information. The hackers got the login credentials of a small number of employees that allowed them to gain access to eBay’s corporate network.

Target

More than 70 million credit and debit card accounts of customers were impacted by the breach that happened in the U.S stores of Target Corporation. This breach was as a result of compromised point-of-sale terminals which were hacked to get customer data during the busiest shopping season of the year.

Starbucks

Starbucks app was hacked twice in a gap of few months, where in hackers stole money from several Starbucks customers by gaining access to their credit card information through the app and using the autoload function. Criminals were using Starbucks accounts to access consumers’ linked credit cards. Taking advantage of the Starbucks auto-reload function, they could steal hundreds of dollars in a matter of minutes.

These examples were pulled from App Knox. Check out the full list, along with common cyber threats ecommerce companies should keep an eye out for: https://blog.appknox.com/top-cyber-threats-ecommerce-companies/

How can we use the analytics data from ecommerce sites to help us test?

The key metrics you’ve chosen to track can inform your testing approach to help better refine your testing focus areas. As a direct correlation to my findings from Day 26 (re: tracking user activity), here are examples of a few data points along with testing cues:

Traffic - Audience - Demographics > to identify major user personas 

Traffic - Audience - Browser/Usage > to help triage cross-platform and layout issues

Top of funnel - Browsing site > to outline primary workflows and visual testing (i.e., product page content)

Bottom of funnel - Purchasing > to outline primary workflows and key functionality (i.e., adding to shopping cart)

Email/Social media marketing > integration testing

Learn about how users are tracked on ecommerce websites/apps.

While most influencers in the world of analytics will implore you to track anything and everything (because you can), 3 focus areas seemed to emerge in my findings:

Top Level Traffic

audience and demographics

bounce rate

landing pages

Check out this introductory guide by Shopify on gleaning basic web traffic insights: https://www.shopify.ca/guides/make-your-first-ecommerce-sale/web-analytics

Conversion Funnel Analysis

Perhaps the most important user activity to be tracked has to do with events and behaviours leading up to, and including, the purchasing action.

The idea of funnel analytics is that your target audience will go through a step-by-step flow or funnel until they make a purchase on your site. 

Reference: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/intro-to-ecommerce-analytics/

External Activities 

Also important to track is the various and most effective entryways into the site via newsletters and promos.

email marketing 

social media

other external referrals

What security concerns do you associate with ecommerce and how would you test them?

I circled back to Day 22 when we covered data security, as a starting point. I looked into how one might test common potential security risks and uncovered techniques which can be applied to the context of ecommerce platform testing:

Access to application

Authentication & Authorization

Fraudulent behaviour is a big one, and it’s important to test from various types of user accounts (especially if they have specific roles/rights within the system).

In order to test this, thorough testing of all roles and rights should be performed. The tester should create several user accounts with different as well multiple roles. Verify that every role has access to its own modules, screens, forms, and menus only and identify any conflicts.

tl;dr “you need to test about ‘who you are’ and ‘what you can do’ for distinct users.”

Data protection

Testing sensitive data as it moves throughout a system to ensure it doesn’t become exposed when it shouldn’t is critical. From the moment it’s entered into the database, throughout the stuff that happens in between, right up to the end to “ensure that the encrypted data is properly decrypted at the destination”.

Proper security measures must be adopted when the flow of sensitive or business critical data occurs. Whether this data floats between different modules of the same application or is transmitted to different applications, it must be encrypted to keep it safe.

Resource: https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/how-to-test-application-security-web-and-desktop-application-security-testing-techniques/

Also check out this quick overview of some other focus areas within the scope of security testing, and a basic security test that may get overlooked: http://softwaretestingfundamentals.com/security-testing/

Who's had a high profile public ecommerce failure that you've read about in the news?

Two types of ‘fails’ came to mind: 

The ones that were funny...

Like when online shoppers received something they weren’t quite expecting:

17 Online Shopping Fails That Will Actually Make You Laugh (via BuzzFeed)

Baffled Shoppers Share Hilarious Online Shopping Fails (via Daily Mail)

And the not so funny...

Like when brands promote a product or campaign and it goes sideways:

Dove’s “racist ad” (via Ad Age)

H&M’s offensive shirt mishaps (via Huffington Post)