Mobile users are spending more than ever, whether on apps and virtual products or on physical items. Mobile accounts for 34% of e-commerce transactions, making it important that your app or mobile website is optimized for a smooth customer experience.
In countries like Japan and South Korea, the amount of m-commerce activity is even larger, with more than 50% of e-commerce transactions handled via mobile.
Despite mobile’s growing importance, many app and website developers make the mistake of treating mobile traffic as a second priority. They design for desktop first and mobile second — a decision that leaves a huge volume of sales (and lots of revenue) on the table.
One of the most common m-commerce mistakes is a lax approach to quality assurance. Many merchants spend a huge amount of time fixing bugs and optimizing for a great user experience on their desktop website, all while doing little to find and fix bugs on mobile.
The end result is a poor user experience that reduces conversions, drives away customers and sabotages your results.
Below, we’ve listed three common QA testing mistakes that could compromise your results from m-commerce. If you sell anything via mobile, from virtual goods to physical products, make sure you aren’t committing these conversion-killing QA testing mistakes.
Poor registration and onboarding QA testing
First impressions matter, especially when it comes to mobile apps. If your app’s registration and onboarding process is overly complicated or affected by bugs, you’ll lose a huge share of your prospective customers before they even make it into your mobile store.
Earning an app install is tough, especially in a competitive vertical. If you don’t thoroughly test your app’s registration flow, you could end up losing users who aren’t willing to spend time on a buggy, overly complex or poorly designed registration form.
One of the simplest ways to improve your sign-up flow is to use a third-party identity provider for your app’s registration process. Facebook Login is by far the most popular choice for this, with a 77% market share as of Q2 2015.
Since third-party logins simplify the sign-up process for users, they can increase your download to registration rate. They also simplify QA testing, since you’re building your sign-up flow around proven code that’s already used by millions of users and thousands of other applications.
Lack of cross-device testing
While the majority of e-commerce merchants test their websites on different desktop operating systems and browsers, few take the same thorough approach to testing their mobile apps and websites across a variety of devices.
When a prospective customer visits your m-commerce store on their mobile device, can you be sure they’ll be able to view it correctly? Can you be sure they’ll be able to navigate your website correctly and check out without issues?
One of the most common m-commerce mistakes is testing across too narrow a range of mobile devices. Mobile developers cite the fact that there are “so many [devices] to support” as one of the biggest barriers to creating new mobile apps.
Your customers use a wide range of different devices. Using a platform like MyCrowd QA, which is built around tens of thousands of testers and more than 18,000 different devices, you can test your app for quality and usability without the device diversity confines of traditional QA testing.
Incomplete bug reporting
Even if your QA testing process reveals bugs, it’s far from uncommon for them to go unreported and unfixed due to communication issues. This is a particularly big problem when your app has a tight schedule before release and speed, rather than comprehensiveness, is a priority.
If you’re doing your QA testing internally, and particularly if you have a small team, it’s easy for a bug that popped up during testing to go unreported. Your developers don’t receive the time they need to fix it, and your app is released with bugs that compromise user experience.
No matter how “simple” your mobile app might seem, it’s probably not simple enough for a small QA testing team to work on. Tap into a larger audience of testers and you’ll discover more bugs and get more thorough reporting, making it easier for you to release a high quality mobile app.
Are you losing money because of poor QA testing?
Every bug in your mobile app is costing you money in the form of lost sales, poor user retention and negative feedback. Set up your first QA test with MyCrowd QA to find bugs in your mobile app that are costing you money and prioritize them for your development team.
