30 Days of Ecommerce Testing Day 19: Performance Testing Strategies

I read a few articles including: 7 Tips for Load Testing an E-Commerce Site and 4 key factors to consider in performance testing of E-commerce applications.

The first includes a list of things to check, as well as some caveats. This includes payment processing, email functionality, inventory, and back end integration.

The caveats I think can be summed up as follows: When you are load testing, don’t create more work for yourself, or place undue burden on the systems you are NOT supposed to be testing as a result. For example, if you are testing e-mail functionality, you should probably have all the emails sent to the same address, or you can imagine the cleanup you might have to do afterwards!

Also, don’t tick off your payment processor! Load testing on their system might get you shut out. In theory, your payment processor has already load tested their systems - but if you must, make sure you make the appropriate arrangements with them.

Anyway, see the full article for the details.

The second article is a higher level overview including more advice about making sure you check across geographies, include mobile and cloud based testing, and test across all browsers and devices. I don’t think this information is really specific to load testing, but it is good to keep in mind.

-Dave K

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I was reading this blog https://loadfocus.com/blog/2015/08/20/top-10-performance-testing-tips-and-tricks/ which is not focused on e-commerce but it still might be interesting to read.
The most important features to do in a e-commerce is

  • Bottlenecks: it is really common during important events that the pages are collapsed because of the huge amount of clients. In particular this is critical where it comes into a particular page. A great example is when a new ticket for an important event, such a rock concert, came up and a thousand of users are aware and waiting to buy it. The step between the payment method confirmation and the purchase confirmation is a possible bottleneck.
  • Load testing on login pages: login pages are critical in order to confirm the credentials of the future customer. A non-functional login page could cost thousands of dollars and could be fatal for a company. So it will be needed to test this feature.

I don’t have more ideas as probably I don’t have much experience about performance testing. I will be waiting for future posts :slight_smile:

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As i am not aware of performance testing that much, but i could gather points, thanks to google

Request per second
Transaction Per minute
Execution per click
Response time of page load
duration of the transaction
Length of time between click
page display
DNS lookup.

Apart from these, as we had already considered busiest times, i could think of these too

  1. Load testing
  2. Stress testing

during busiest times

These say when and on what factors performance testing is needed.

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@conorfi has a whole tread on this!

My Day 19

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I worked on some performance testing projects using Jmeter:

We will do performance testing for a flow page load test, stress test

  1. Performance testing for a flow: checkout flow, search flow, access products details page by carousel flow…
  2. Page load test with concurrent users, increasing the concurrent users ascending but not be over the breakpoint that we find out in the stress test. Run the test in some hours to make sure it works stable…
  3. Stress test: increasing the concurrent users ascending until the server hangs, the site down or application failed…

Some tips in this link: https://loadfocus.com/blog/2015/08/20/top-10-performance-testing-tips-and-tricks/