Retail Platform Assurance – Amplify the User Experience

According to the research of globenewswire, the worldwide retail analytics market size grew up by USD 4.3 billion in 2020. It is projected to rise with USD 11.1 billion by 2025. The retail analytics market is growing due to major factors like many companies have started moving their customer’s data or business data to the cloud. They demand customized dashboards for data visualization and focus more on data generation.   

After experiencing 100% growth in sales last year, Apple is planning to expand its retail presence in India. The competition is high in the market. It’s time to focus on glitches because one little mistake in the retail application can result in missed-out sales, lost customers and may force your visitors to leave negative reviews across the web.  

We need to make our application proactive, smarter, and personalized. We need to give power to them with intelligent process automation to accelerate time to market, reduce human error, increase throughput.   

Understand Quality Issues in Retail Sector & Know How to Fix Them  

Poor Inventory Management  

Poor inventory management is one of the prime reasons why small retail businesses are easy to fail. A study posted in the California Management Review shows that companies have to pay 10% of their profits each year due to inaccuracy in inventory records. One must have a clear understanding of products in the retail environment. You must have a keep an eye on what products are out of stock. It is your responsibility to analyze when to buy and what to buy, especially if you want to stay in the competition. Retailers can experience a loss of about 3.4% because desired products are not available on the page.    

Inaccurate Data    

You need to understand what inventory you have. You can wait for some days to publish correct data on your site, but remember, your customers will never wait because you’re not the only one who is doing an online business. They have plenty of options and brands, which they can choose to fulfill their needs.   

Inconsistent Tracking   

Using manual inventory tracking procedures across different spreadsheets and software is redundant, time-consuming, and vulnerable to errors. Small businesses often use a log book or a stock book to keep track of how many items have been sold. They always try to get an advantage from a centralized inventory tracking system because it allows them to include accounting features.   

Manual Documentation  

Controlling the inventory process with manual strategies or paperwork is not a good option as well as not much secure. It even doesn’t give efficiency for warehouses where you’re responsible for storage, receipt, and movement of goods.   

Stock Problems   

Fragile and perishable items need a specialized strategy for storage and care. Inventory controls and specific loss-prevention procedures are always required for high-value inventory.   

Inadequate Order Management   

When you don’t consider retail software testing for order management software, it becomes difficult for you to run inventory and prevent overselling. That’s why modern retail trends suggest you focus on seasonal data because it allows you to predict customer orders more accurately.   

Poor Production Planning    

Production planning is vital to avoid cost overruns and delayed manufacturing. If it is not done well, it can influence on project scheduling and sales forecasts.  

Growing Competition    

Rising economies like Latin America, China, India are becoming warehouse management companies, which is another challenge of effective inventory management. These emerging markets offer benefits like material costs, low labor costs, and low currency values. Due to the easy international shipping procedure, you need to work on the supply chain, and it would be great if you ensure its efficiency because that can help you beat the competition.   

The Effects of Poor Inventory are:   

• Lost Customers.   

• Missed sales.   

• Low liquidity.  

Read our case study on Nurturing the Best of Integration, Security, & Service for an Online
E-commerce Portal. Click here.

Fix Inventory Management Issues with Quality Assurance

Quality assurance of inventory management system is extremely important for the long-term stability and prosperity of the company. It doesn’t matter what strategies you use for managing your inventory, but it matters a lot how much profit you’re able to generate in a particular time period. Keep in mind, poor inventory practices can reduce your revenue and down your business. With robust retail quality assurance testing, you can ensure that your inventory system will fulfill requirements in terms of consistency, comparability, transparency, accuracy, and completeness.   

There are different types of testing that you can consider for your retail sector.  

• Mobile Testing   

Have a look at statistics of mobile apps   

1. Mobile applications are projected to grow over $935 billion in revenue by 2023.   

2. 49% of people open an application 11 times in a single day.   

3. The Apple app store has around 1.96 million applications available for download. However, in the Google Play Store, there are 2.87 million applications available.   

4. 69% of US digital media comes from mobile apps.   

5. 21% of Millenials open an app about 50 times per day.   

6. People from all over the world are using tablets and smartphones.   

Whenever you make a plan to purchase retail app testing services, just make sure the service provider is ready to give you mobile-based testing in its package. The motto of mobile testing is to ensure that the retail-based mobile application will work consistently and helps businesses get a first-class experience while checking its performance, functionality, and usability.  

While getting testing, don’t forget to check the latest quality assurance trends for retail. Generally, for any QA testing, the latest trends for 2021 are:   

• IoT Testing.  

• DevOps and Agile.   

• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.   

• Performance Engineering.   

Gartner predicts that 77% of retailers decide to deploy AI by 2021, plus they also plan to deploy robotics for warehouse picking as the first-class use case.    

• Test Automation   

Likewise, other trends, test automation comes as a blessing and helps us experience emerging trends in 2021. Test automation eliminates the time needed for running repetitive tasks from days to hours. It offers shorter delivery cycles and allows retailers to save more cost, and gives them faster deployment solutions.   

Today, our customers expect that the retail application will give the best user experience. The new trends in the retail industry are e-Commerce, POS (Point of Sale), mobile payments, and even many companies prefer data analytics to check customer behavior. By using manual testing, we can satisfy such types of needs. However, automation testing helps us obtain the desired results and lets us earn more profits from digital transformation and supports while managing huge test volumes.   

As a retailer, you may face several challenges in the industry, but it allows you to overcome issues in quick minutes when you consider automation testing. 

  For example, with test automation, you can experience the following benefits:   

• Enhance Speed at low cost.   

• Easy integration with third-party applications.   

• Omni-channel deployment.   

• Security improvement.   

•  Load Testing   

Retail businesses use a POS or Point of Sale software to carry out transactions effortlessly from any part of the world. This software is very complex because it is integrated with various software systems like purchase order, warehouse, supply chain, merchandise planning, and marketing. Now, the chances are high there will be a high load on the system. After all, vast amounts of data are available on such systems.   

In case of not performing POS load testing, you can experience more performance bottlenecks and more risks in system downtime. Not only this, one should have POS domain knowledge to conduct this type of testing, plus ensuring the scalability of the system is crucial. Otherwise, you can have issues in upgrades, PCI compliance, interfaces, configurations, or you may find it challenging to maintain the post errors.   

• Functional Testing   

Retail sector operations include customer service, product inventory, administration, cash & fraud management. You also work for several functions like forecast budgets and sales, hire and manage a number of employees. You may also manage their firing process or train them to take your business to the next level. Apart from that, you may check all internal working and manage both inside and outside communication. You also ensure to meet the conditions of legal compliance. There are several things that you do in your retail business.   

Thus, to check several functional aspects of your application, you need to hire a tester for properly performing retail domain software testing. In the modern agile development field, software testers perform different types of functional tests such as integration testing, unit testing, interface testing, sanity testing, smoke testing, acceptance testing, and regression testing. Now the point is what functional test you need for your application. The better answer you can get the manufacturer of retail app testing services because they have experts who can help you understand or provide you a roadmap for functional testing.   

Usually, the objective of the functional test is to ensure that the software application is working in good condition. In this testing, testers test the main functions of the application. They perform usability testing to help users get a smooth screen navigation experience. It also checks for errors and removes bugs, if any present in the app.  

To grab more information about functional testing, you can click here.  

1. Other Types of Retail Platform Assurance Testing Include:  

• Compatibility Testing

• RFID Testing 

• Big Data Testing  

• Continuous Testing  

• Device Testing 

• System Operation Acceptance Testing  

• Compliance Testing 

• Cybersecurity Testing   

Conclusion   

You are probably planning to expand your business. But do you know consumers are business and the spine of any business success? The entire goal of the retail sector is to create and develop products and services that satisfy the particular needs of customers. Therefore, retail testing services & QA is essential because it helps you build trust with your potential and targeted customers, and make it easy for you to detect and fix flaws and issues early in the development stage. Even it assures to fulfill your client’s expectations and demands. With testing services, you can easy to control quality in retail and treat your customers right. Remember that if you treat them right and provide them right, they will definitely come back to you like your regular customers.   

Are you worried about who will give you top-notch retail testing services online? That’s we, BugRaptors. You need an experienced testing partner and quality guarantee to amplify the user experience. As a CMMI Level-5 Certified software testing company, we have domain-specific experience and good relationships with different retailers worldwide. Connect with us. We will take care of all your unique testing needs for the retail niche and gives you a 2X faster ROI experience.   

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