Contents 1. The Rise of Retail Digital Transformation 2. Key Factors Driving Today’s Retail Digital Transformation 3. Primary Benefits of Retail Digital Transformation 4. An Overview of a Right Test Strategy for Successful Retail Transformation 5. Key Benefits Retailers Get with Effective Retail Application Testing 6. Conclusion

The Rise of Retail Digital Transformation

Retail is one of the leading industries that has seen tremendous growth in the last 5 years. With the COVID-19 pandemic hitting the globe, the need for retail digital transformation pushed businesses to move online as per the rising needs of the competitive market. The retail IT system is a dynamic ecosystem that involves critical applications such as social media, POS, web apps, and mobile apps, along with inventory, delivery, and product management. Customers’ ever-evolving needs are pushing retail organizations to deliver and deploy new services and features much faster than ever before.

Key Factors Driving Today’s Retail Digital Transformation

Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning (ML):

Machine learning strengthens the retailer-customer bond by helping retail businesses better understand and predict customer needs. ML is the data science that collects data from different sources and feeds the data into ML models that forecasts future outcomes.

Data received and processed via ML models enables retailers to measure shopping patterns, understand buying habits, adjust offers, personalize recommendations, and create forecasts based on the trends and preferences of the customers.

Unified commerce:

Shoppers today use multiple channels – web, mobile, social, etc. and expect retail businesses to always be available across all these channels. Many retailers implement a unified commerce strategy in a single and integrated platform that controls different business systems from a common interface. Unified commerce interconnects the systems of eCommerce, mobile commerce, customer relationship management, and more to gain insights into optimizing the existing customer experience.

Before the unified commerce concept, retailers used multiple systems to manage their business components. Trying to collect data from multiple systems is time-consuming and resource-draining. To retain the customers’ data integrity and ensure a unified customer experience across multiple platforms, retail businesses should break down data siloes and integrate data from disparate sources into a unified commerce system.

AI-driven customer support:

Customers expect quick answers and assistance at any time – and the more accessible, the more convenient it is, the better the customer experience. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a meaningful new way to deliver the 24/7 service that shoppers now expect. For instance, AI-driven chatbots can act as digital store associates, instantly responding to customer queries through texts or chatbot messages.

Chatbots can also understand customers’ engagement and upsell or cross-sell products. AI Chatbots are cost-effective and act as instant response tools that are helping today’s leading retailers to freeze conversions and create new business opportunities.

Primary Benefits of Retail Digital Transformation

1. Enhances customer experience (CX):

Retail digital transformation enables retailers to uplift their in-store and online experiences. Technologies such as big data, location-based services, eCommerce, and mobile apps allow retailers to offer unified and personalized customer service thus enhancing the CX.

2. Improves enterprise agility:

Digital technology is moving at a lightning pace. Retail businesses that embrace digital transformation gain the ability to capitalize on digitization initiatives and be future-ready.

3. Strengthens the supply chain:

A digital supply chain strengthens supplier-carrier connectivity via streamlined inventory management, integrated demand forecasting, etc. These benefits optimize the existing retail supply chains, allowing retailers to meet their operational efficiency goals and offer timely deliveries to customers.

An Overview of a Right Test Strategy for Successful Retail Transformation

Retail applications are frequently updated and released in today’s dynamic digital landscape. The rapid application releases should deliver efficient, fit-for-purpose solutions with high speed and agility. Testing for retail applications is often repeated across all supported operating systems and hardware configurations during the development cycles.

Retail businesses should leverage test automation since manually repeating such tests takes more time than they ideally should. Test automation allows retail businesses to run repetitive regression tests in much less time, leading to faster time-to-market. Once created, automated tests can be run when required at no extra QA cost, which means faster deployment and valuable cost savings for the retailer.

1. Leverage integration testing to manage complex integrations:

A mature retail ecosystem should seamlessly integrate internal and third-party components. Testing for integration of the dynamic landscape of devices, operating systems, ISPs, and applications across the digital and physical spaces is challenging for testers. A thorough functional testing and non-functional testing test strategy must be deployed based on the integration challenges that arise due to the diversity of retail channels and dynamic customer behavior.

2. Adopt end-to-end testing for a seamless omnichannel experience:

Customers today expect to shop anytime, anywhere, from any device, and wish for a seamless experience across devices. As a result, there is a need to test the user experience over the ever-growing number of devices, combined with various operating system versions and network bandwidth simulations. This is achieved with thorough and automated regression testing.

3. Adopt security testing in the DevOps cycle:

Digital transformation has sharpened security and data integrity. The high number of mobile payment solutions, POS applications, mobile payment solutions, and POS credit card-enabled apps make the entire system highly vulnerable to security threats if not correctly configured and tested. End-to-end security testing for potential threats is necessary by focusing on application profiling, authentication, data validation, and encryption algorithms.

4. Perform Point of Sale (POS) Testing for a seamless UX:

The retail ecosystem features inventory, CRM apps, data warehousing, e-commerce channels, supply chain management, and POS systems. Customer experience is at the center of effective retail business operations. A poor-quality experience at the storefront or with mobile apps hampers UX and should be eliminated with a specialized POS testing process.

5. Leverage performance testing for high-performing apps:

A positive user experience (UX) can be a crucial differentiator for a retail business. Similarly, a poor UX can hamper retail business outcomes and damage the brand’s reputation. Functionalities such as personalized search and product discovery of products offer an in-store-like experience to the customers. It is crucial to ensure a consistent user and brand experience across various channels and form factors.

6. Leverage automation testing with the latest tools:

Test automation helps to deliver faster releases of the retail apps within shorter timelines, which helps software developers and QA teams to deliver faster. Retail apps testing should include leveraging advanced test automation frameworks to test various application scenarios with the latest test automation tools.

Key Benefits Retailers Get with Effective Retail Application Testing

Faster and quality releases for retailers:

Automation testing, when leveraged to design a comprehensive regression suite for retail app testing, will provide instant feedback on the code, helping make an informed decision on the production code deployment.

Improves customer experience & enhances user experience:

Across the eCommerce channel as the application becomes glitch-free and improves business outcomes as new features are thoroughly tested before going to market.

Early detection of bugs in the SDLC:

Along with functional testing, non-functional testing is critical for retail platforms and applications to cover performance, security, and accessibility scenarios, as impact in this area directly leads to degrading usability and customer experience. An automation testing approach can be implemented for non-functional testing to get shift-left of non-functional testing and fix issues earlier in the SDLC.

Enhances the coverage of retail omnichannel apps:

Testing the omnichannel availability of retail applications in a limited timeframe is challenging, owing to the high number of platforms, devices, and OS combinations. Emulator-based automation testing helps to mitigate quality risk in the least possible time to validate application behaviour on different platforms.

Ensures seamless integrations:

Retail platforms amalgamate systems and sub-systems such as UI, payment gateways, third-party APIs, data warehouse, reporting tools, middleware, etc. Testing all these systems is difficult but mandatory to ensure no break in the entire process. This testing, when automated, yields requisite coverage within the short timeline and provides a view of end-to-end use cases.

Faster testing outcomes with AI and RPA:

AI and ML-based automation testing has further improved the quality, efficiency, and speed of risk mitigation and achieving business goals of retail apps. Self-healing frameworks can optimize the test scripts during changes in GUI web elements and reduce the resources required for maintaining test scripts.

Conclusion

Businesses looking to implement a successful retail digital transformation should think globally. It’s not a simple web app but a seamless and immersive experience across all digital and physical channels. Testing e-commerce applications is critical to driving online sales and delivering a great user experience. Businesses should ensure the website or mobile device apps are globally available and accessible to all. Therefore, effective end-to-end digital testing is essential for retail software.

Leverage our experts with domain knowledge in digital testing to achieve quality retail software. Connect with our automated testing services.

The post How Right Test Strategy Ensures Successful Retail Digital Transformation? first appeared on TestingXperts.

Content 1. Surge in eCommerce Industry 2. Need for Retailers to Invest in eCommerce Business and Platforms 3. Surge in eCommerce Business during this Pandemic 4. How to Build your E-commerce Business During COVID-19 Pandemic? 5. Conclusion

Surge in eCommerce Industry

Undoubtedly, COVID-19 has been hurting mankind in all ways mentioned above, and even the in-store traffic has come to a halt as people rarely visit stores to buy their products due to the prevailing situation.

It is interesting to note that although the in-stores have been widely affected, there has been surges in the online shopping using all preferred mediums of eCommerce channels using digital transformation, as people are forced to stay at home and place their orders as they experience anxiety over the virus spread.

According to Adobe Analytics, data which monitors the eCommerce transactions of 80 of the top 100 U.S. retailers, it states that there is a mounting concern over the COVID-19 outbreak’s impact in the United States on the online shopping behavior.

Another research by RetailDive suggests that it is a boon to eCommerce business, which allows consumers to find what they require without physically visiting to a store. While COVID-19 is hurting in-store traffic for some retailers, others have seen surges in online shopping, as anxiety over the pandemic increases.

Need for Retailers to Invest in eCommerce Business and Platforms

This pandemic outbreak has led to the inevitability of people accessing digital mediums to perform their shopping using various online eCommerce websites. It is a truth that to everyone’s dismay, the supply chains are disrupted and majorly with the production lines halted, there is a necessity for retailers to invest in eCommerce business to further sustain post this COVID-19 situation.

Basically, an eCommerce platform helps their retailers to minimize the impact of any future disruptions and essentially upholds their sales numbers even in the absence of foot traffic to their physical stores.

Moreover, eCommerce business is said to deliver many benefits for micro, small and medium retailers by providing them access to wider markets, and ensuring greater geographic access to their products. These eCommerce sites also help in making them successfully compete with larger players in the segment.

Thus, the eCommerce business during this pandemic has been facing more demand for essential products such as healthcare products, medicines, hand sanitizers, face masks and other medical products.

Now. Let us look at some of the top reasons for the surge in eCommerce business during the pandemic.

Surge in eCommerce Business during this Pandemic

Today, with people living in isolation and uncertainty around, there has been changes in their shopping behavior. As stated by Business Insider, peoples shopping behavior has been changed from bulk-buying to online shopping, people are changing what they’re buying, when, and how.

Surge in online medical item purchases:

It has been observed that with the pandemic, there has been an evident spurt in the purchase of medicines post the COVID-19 outbreak. With the virus fears spreading more, people are generally opting to order and buy more medicines.

Adobe’s analysis of eCommerce transactions found that purchases for cold, cough & flu products have increased 198%, while online purchases for pain relievers increased 152%. eCommerce purchases of the virus protection category of products such as hand sanitizers, gloves, masks and antibacterial sprays have surged by 817%, according to Adobe’s analysis.

Rush for purchase of groceries online increased:

There has been an increased sale of groceries as people are essentially locked down and wish to support themselves from this unprecedented situation by ordering online through eCommerce sites.

Easy access to essential products:

Today, due to the coronavirus contagious disease, people prefer safe purchase and eventually prefer safe shopping experience. They continue to order and purchase essential products through performing online digital transactions to keep themselves safe from any possible virus exposure.

All the above factors state the increasing importance of eCommerce business. Hence, retailers should take all possible steps to ensure great shopping experience to their customers.

How to Build your E-commerce Business During COVID-19 Pandemic?

With the growing uneasiness around the world with the spread of the coronavirus, it is keeping people away from moving around at public places and there is thinning attendance across all the physical stores. They prefer to choose eCommerce platforms for their essentials due to the unforeseen eventuality caused due to the pandemic.

Hence, eCommerce businesses should take advantage of the situation and ensure their eCommerce platforms, eCommerce websites and eCommerce mobile apps are flawless, secure, and are delivering great user experience with great performance.

1. Ensure to deliver seamless eCommerce platform/web/mobile apps performance:

While users add the products to their cart as they browse for the products of their choice, it is important that the eCommerce websites and eCommerce apps should deliver great user experience. eCommerce apps should be flawless and perform seamlessly even while handling loads of users.

In order to achieve seamless mobile app performance, businesses should avail effective performance and load testing by next-gen performance testing experts. This is more important especially with the present COVID-19 situation, as more users continue to login and place their orders through eCommerce sites.

2. Ensure seamless digital transactions along with Security:

Online customers tend to abandon eCommerce apps and eCommerce websites when they encounter delays at the processing time. It is essential for retail businesses to ensure and deliver seamless digital transactions during order processing.

In addition, along with the seamless payment and order processing, users should be ensured of safe and secure transactions at every level. With the connected devices and connected world in place, there are more cyber-attacks that have become common across eCommerce channels.

Hence, this can be overcome by leveraging effective security testing by next-gen security testing experts. These security testing experts perform end-to-end security testing to deliver eCommerce websites and apps that are safe and secure for performing digital transactions. They even safeguard eCommerce portals from any possible threats and vulnerabilities in these unprecedented times.

3. Adopt AI and ML Models in apps to improve CX:

Businesses can use Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to really entice their users with great features that delight customers by delivering great user experience (UX). It is essential to deliver an effective AI-enabled eCommerce based model that delivers all latest features the millennials look for today.

4. Use of Latest AR & VR Technology to Ease Customer Preferences:

eCommerce businesses should look out to adopt augmented and virtual reality to try on each product. During the on-going crisis, this might work out better especially for some of the shopping categories like shoes, bags, etc.

5. Establish ways to reassure customers better informed:

During this crisis period, communicate properly with your customers to ensure about their order placement status and answer all their queries quickly. Also inform the people the latest updated news through maintaining a blog or a separate portal that holds handy for the customers.

Conclusion

In these testing times with COVID-19 pandemic, isolating people with social distancing and lockout in many countries, users continue to look out for options to ease their shopping behavior. Undoubtedly, during lockdown and further, people will look for eCommerce options to purchase medicines, groceries and other essential products.

This is a crucial time when retailers need to brace up and build their eCommerce business by enabling effective and seamless secure digital transactions to attract more users. It is essential for businesses to look out for performance and security testing of their eCommerce mobile apps and eCommerce websites to ensure safe and secure transactions along with delivering great customer experience to digital customers.

The post What is the Effect of Current Pandemic on Retail eCommerce? first appeared on TestingXperts.

Contents 1. What should Retail industry CEOs Look for in 2022? 2. What are the Generic Challenges Faced by Retail Businesses? 3. What are the Common Software (Application) Challenges Faced by Retailers? 4. Software Testing for Retail 5. What are the testing services required for Retail Apps? 6. What are the Benefits Retailers Get with Effective Software Testing? 7. Conclusion

In recent years with rapid digitalization across business sectors, the Retail industry has been the most impacted by these digitization moves. The Retail segment mainly delivers an omnichannel experience. This includes a user-friendly and stable customer experience at the front end and a load of transaction data at the back-end. The retail segment software includes inventory, CRM apps, data warehousing, e-commerce channels, supply chain management, and Point of sale (POS) systems, etc. Undoubtedly, the effective working of retail software drives the return on investment (ROI) for retailers.

Especially, for the retail industry, the customer experience is at the center of their business. A poor quality experience at the storefront or with mobile apps that process the payment transactions would greatly impact customer experience and affects their business bottom line!

Also, the retail marketplace centered over POS needs to satisfy customers by delivering effective user experience. This can be achieved by a specialized POS testing process, else it has a significant impact on overall retail business outcomes.

What should Retail industry CEOs Look for in 2022?

• Digital readiness to deliver an exceptional customer experience (CX)

• Deliver high-quality solutions to best meet consumer behavior with early-to-market

• Data and insights-driven approach to digital eCommerce and omnichannel presence

• Focus on products for better performance and sustainability by adopting proper market approaches to appeal to the audience (especially Millennials & Gen Z)

• Process automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and data analytics to help eCommerce & retail businesses achieve more by enhancing solutions with improved CX

• Introduce effective business models that drive higher ROI and, at the same time, innovate with new services and offerings to meet ever-growing customer demand

Today, the retail sector is constantly changing and there are new challenges faced by all players. The challenges are faced at both the business as well as application level. These challenges should be properly fixed to ensure retail business success.

Overview of Present Retail Sector

For today’s businesses, the online channel has evidently become the most effective platform to perform their business transactions. Every business domain continues to take the complete advantage of online marketing to enchant their customers. Evidently, internet retailing has become a modern pathway for shopping to many internet surfers and online users. The increase in the usage of mobile phones, e-commerce, and internet services has truly simplified shopping means and effectively multiplied the scope of online shopping.

Over the past few years, online retailing is trending and accounting to over 1.5% sales across the globe. This is because of the available easy shopping ways being enabled through mobile apps, online channels and the availability of umpteen online payment and transaction methods. Among the many industry types that are emerging today, retail is one of the finest and fastest-growing sectors. It is the industry where products or services are provided for consumers by following a set of selling methods or practices. Also, it is the sector that is experiencing year-over-year progress.

The main reason why the retail sector is receiving the prominence is due to the changing lifestyle of the people and the increased dependency on obtaining services and products with ease. The need for retail services is tremendously increasing and the statistical report prepared for the total worldwide retail sales is a clear example with a total number of retails estimated over trillion dollars for the coming years.

As per the Global Retail Industry Analysis, in 2017 the retail industry was valued at USD 23,460 billion, but this effective number has been gradually increasing and during the period 2018-2023, it is aimed to reach USD 31,880.8 billion. This is because the retail markets have become more competitive and are excelling to target many developed and small countries to expand their consumer base. Also, the retail giants are preferring the online mode to follow their consumers and provide them the best offers that can result in future sales and increase their brand reputation with the usage of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Internet channels help in increasing the production and as well introduce several other complications for the retail sector. It has become essential for the retail sector to choose mobile technology and leverage proper infrastructure to deliver the best customer experience.

Though the retail segment has been expanding in recent years, it continues to face certain challenges that have been categorized as generic challenges and application-level challenges.

What are the Generic Challenges Faced by Retail Businesses?

• Challenges faced while embracing in the facet of digital transformation across lines of business
• Maintaining customer loyalty continues to be an important challenge for the retailer's success
• Delivering a good customer experience is a major factor to uphold their brand and protect their business
• Keeping up with the ever-changing customer expectations is another critical factor of concern
• Seasonal trends influence customers, and retailers need to balance to upkeep their customer shopping experience both online and offline
• Adopting new technology solutions for the retail industry is an important challenge to deliver secure and safe transactions
• New innovation trends of Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) continue to have a great impact on the retail sector

What are the Common Software (Application) Challenges Faced by Retailers?

• App performance issues negatively affect customer experience and damages brand loyalty
• Security glitches while processing transactions across e-commerce channels also disengages customer from using them
• Customers continue to abandon apps due to payment processing delays
• Increased/Heavy app loading time also adversely affects customer experience
• App usability plays an important role, as complex navigation flows will refrain users from using i

Software Testing for Retail

Primarily, in e-commerce websites and apps, any sort of design issues can greatly hinder business growth. As customers demand the latest features, the online channels failing to deliver these, suffer from customers disengaging.

Any sort of performance and security issues prevailing in online shopping apps adversely affects the customer experience. Hence, in order to overcome these challenges, retailers must adopt effective software quality assurance. The Next-gen software testing services will ensure and deliver a great customer experience.

What are the testing services required for Retail Apps?

An Overview of the Retail App Features and the corresponding testing service required to achieve Quality at speed

• Retail apps are generally integrated with several external hardware and software peripherals. There is a need for thorough functional testing and non-functional testing services
• Retail apps user interface (UI) and business processes change frequently. Hence they need thorough testing with automated regression testing
• Retail apps are integrated with various payment systems which need payment gateway integration testing
• Security testing is essential as customers across their digital journey need fast, effective, safe and secure transactions
• Retail apps require a digital assurance and testing strategy which can be applied to ensure apps perform stably under varying loads
• E-commerce channels should deliver great user experience for which usability testing should be taken up
• Retail apps testing needs embracing Test automation frameworks to test various scenarios of the application with test automation tools
• Test automation helps to deliver faster releases within shorter timelines which helps software developers and QA teams to deliver faster.

What are the Benefits Retailers Get with Effective Software Testing?

Benefits to customers

• Improves customer experience across the e-commerce channel as the application becomes glitch-free
• Quicker development is ensured as defects are identified early in the SDLC
• Improves business outcomes as new features are thoroughly tested before go-to-market
• Enhances user experience with great UI and stable performance with load testing across the e-commerce channels
• The application becomes accessible to one and all and achieves accessibility norms

Benefits to Businesses

• Considerable cost savings assured as faster releases are ensured by embracing test automation
• Reduced time to market as faster releases are achieved with DevOps Continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD)
• Reduced human intervention as test automation is leveraged
• Efficient and comprehensive reports deliver quality insights
• Faster time to market results in a quicker return on investment (RoI)

Conclusion

Retail business use cases are not identical as the retail industry cannot be generalized, unlike other sectors. There is a huge challenge involved in combining retail software with wide integrations all through. This all requires attention to detail and an effective focus on quality.

Hence, testing e-commerce applications is critical to drive online sales and deliver a great user experience. It also makes sure the website or the apps on mobile devices are globally available and accessible to all. Therefore, an effective end-to-end digital testing is essential for retail software.

Leverage our experts with domain knowledge in digital testing to achieve quality retail software. Connect with our automated testing services team.

The post Why Software Testing is Critical for Retail Sector? first appeared on TestingXperts.