On-line retail sales is estimated at $157.4 billion and expected to grow to $271.6 billion (or 9% of retail sales overall) by 2011, Forrester Research estimates [1] 2007. Retail companies are seeing a significant portion of their revenues generated online. These online “storefronts” are delivered to the one place they cannot see — the browser of the customer. Online customers expect a superior user experience every time they access a retail site, regardless of their choice of browsers, browser settings, plug-in, security options, operating systems or hardware. This challenge has led to high levels of customer complaints and massive business impact.


Recent Harris Interactive survey [2] has shown:

•  85 % of users expected their online experiences to be the same as offline
  
  
• 90% of users have experienced some sort of application obstacle forcing them to abandon a transaction.
  
  
• 40 % of those users said that the action they took after experiencing an issue was to simply switch away— permanently — to a competitor, either online or offlin
  
  

The key issues encountered by users are:

• 40% received error messages.
• 37% reported the website was difficult to navigate.
• 31% were unable to complete an action or transaction due to an endless loop.
• 31% had difficulty checking in/logging on the site.
• 22% reported the site search function did not function properly.
• 22% were automatically kicked off the page.


- This represents nearly $50 billion in consumer transactions at risk through the remainder of this decade — in just retail and travels alone.

In the extremely competitive online retail business, running an online channel forces rapid releases that might not often have the opportunity to be either fully tested or totally ready for deployment. Use cases become "best guesses" as customers use the web in unstructured ways. Testing is insufficient and when users access the website from their own unique combination of browser, plug-in, security settings, operating systems, computer and internet connection, the customer experience is significantly compromised. Essentia has pioneered a new class of Customer Experience Testing specifically targeted at online retailers to minimize this risk and enhance customer retention.

Studies reveal that a company could minimize customer abandonment and improve sales conversions noticeably thereby increasing revenues and margins.


Overall benefits of EssentiaBCT

• Provide a great customer experience.
• Increase ROI and gain more customers.
• Increase customer satisfaction.
• Keep up and strengthen branding and reputation in the market place.
  
  
  

Introduction

Browsers have become the standard through which organizations deliver their business to consumers. Both traditional and online businesses use websites as store-fronts, market places or information exchanges to inform and educate online visitors about their products and services to convince them to purchase with a goal to convert them to loyal customers
Customer reach websites from a variety of browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari running on Windows, Linux, MacOS, PalmOS, etc. operating on a variety of hardware platforms such as PCs, Macintosh, PDAs and mobile phones.
Customers expect a superior experience regardless of their browser/OS/platform combinations.

Another key finding of the Harris study was the percentage of customers abandoning the site and switching to the competitor due to these issues.




There are sophisticated web usability techniques and tools to improve user navigation challenges. Issues like the inability to complete transactions, being automatically kicked off, error messages and difficulty checking in/logging on are technology, compatibility and interaction that cannot be addressed by traditional usability tools or traditional quality assurance techniques.




Essentia customers representing US based leading online retailers confirms the above distribution.


Factors affecting customer web experience

The key factors identified with Essentia customers, as well as other similar customers are discussed below:

Increasing complexity of websites

As organizations vie to gain more customers, they strive to provide users with a richer online experience. However rich interactions demand more technical complexity in website design and construction and the use of new technologies require users to have higher capabilities in their systems. Users are often required to download software, install components like ActiveX, plug-ins etc., if they wish to experience rich interaction in their browser. This further adds to the complexity of customer experience testing.


Customized browser settings

Users personalize browser settings for reasons such as improved security, response etc. For instance, a user could disable cookies, block pop–ups stop images from loading automatically, change screen size, resolution, font, type size, and disable JavaScript/java components  all contributing to the heterogeneity in user environment and increase  the complexity of customer experience testing.


Ambiguity of standards

The browser compatibility problem is further compounded by the fact that the existing standards of website development allow ambiguity in implementation. Typically, web developers write code for one browser and then, when they realize that their web sites/pages do not display properly on other browsers, invest a lot more time to make the code work uniformly. 


Comprehensive Customer Experience Testing Environment

A comprehensive customer experience testing environment for online retail needs to address the following unique needs of this market.

• Large number of products and information pages
• Dynamic and rapidly changing products, pricing and promotions
• Geographically diverse and localized markets
• Multiple levels of user experience
• Many transaction/purchase paths
• Tiered customers from premier to corporate to unregistered
• Emerging Web2.0 features like quick view, search driven, reviews

Current solutions do not adequately address this need. Some of the key challenges are:

• Not comprehensive: companies rely on many isolated tools that only address point customer experience issues.
• Traditional tools developed for client-server market of first generation internet have not kept up with market needs
• Mostly depend on manual (visual) testing which is impractical for large websites with millions of pages.
• Current levels of automation do not allow wider exhaustive coverage of test cases.

To adequately address these needs a robust, highly scalable system that can automate customer experience testing across a comprehensive set of browser, platform, rich technology, security mechanisms, content and data architectures is needed. Key features of a comprehensive customer experience solution are as follows:

Site Crawling and Instantiation

Since retail sites are large and rapidly changing, a comprehensive customer experience testing solution needs to be able to explore the full site and track updates to the site in a comprehensive manner.

Site URL Data Base

A database that stores and updates all the URLs on the site and provides archiving capabilities to be able to adequately track and manage the customer experience testing.


Comprehensive Customer Environment Support

The solution must accurately identify all past, present, and even future browsers. It must also detect disabled JavaScript and cookies, plug-ins, connection speeds, security settings, display size, Java capabilities and other settings needed to ensure that the  site’s minimum requirements are met.


Archiving and Incremental Runs

A complete archive of test runs and results along with the ability to identify new content additions or site updates.


Automated Cross-Browser Testing

There is large volume of work before releasing the site, such as integration of platform, content and data with very short time windows before release. In such a situation, all browsers testing within the system must be automated and should require little or no manual involvement. Environments that require visual or manual testing will not scale to meet the needs of this market.


Configurable Compliance Checking

Sites will need to maintain their code to W3C or internally defined standards that can be checked for compliance by the system.


Static & Dynamic Content

Sites will often contain static product information pages but require dynamic workflows to be executed by the user to support product configuration, shopping and purchase. Support to both static and dynamic workflows is imperative.Sites will often contain static product information pages but require dynamic workflows to be executed by the user to support product configuration, shopping and purchase. Support to both static and dynamic workflows is imperative.


Support for Rich Content

Most recent sites use rich content to enhance user experience and provide purchase paths directly of the rich content. The ability to interpret flash for example to understand the embedded URLs and hence branch points within the code is needed to provide comprehensive testing.


Automated Test Generation (ATG)

A majority of the retail content has action buttons embedded in them. The ability to automatically exercise these actions eliminates the need for scripting and maintenance which tend to be a very large effort. As pages change rapidly the ATG unit can stay on top of these changes by creating new scripts on the fly to support the changes on the page.


Page Load Time Monitoring

The solution must track the actual web page load times as experienced by each user on the site, including network latency. This allows for understanding response times and, additionally, is a critical analysis tool to determine whether customer experience issues are driven by performance or functional errors.


Fast and efficient analysis

Due to the high volume of pages and tests, a fast and easy- to-use result analysis and reporting environment is the key.


Easily accommodates growth:

This solution should not only meet current size and test time requirements, but should also effortlessly accommodate future needs as the business scales up and test time availability is further reduced.


Dedicated and responsive support

The uniqueness and complexity of customer experience testing demands a live support team with an extensive knowledge base and an experienced service team. This is critical for solution deployment and rapid productivity.




EssentiaBCT


Essentia introduced the first on-demand Customer Experience Testing service that is fully automated, built on industrial-strength data bases and contains core capabilities like image-compare, auto-test generation, configurable validation, page loads to support the testing of a broad range of rich, static and dynamic pages.

EssentiaBCT is a package compromising of four functional modules:

• Link Checker: Identifies broken links and provides detailed status of error URL’s.
• HTML Validator: Assures that web pages are compatible across browsers by identifying HTML syntax errors and validating them the web standards of World Wide Web Consortium. (W3C).  
• Web Runner: An in-browser automated functional testing tool to test JavaScript, AJAX and Dynamic contents of web pages. It records every single action as well action captures screen shots of these actions. Test script captured in one browser can be used for testing across multiple browsers.
• Image Compare: To capture and compare screen shots of web pages across multiple OS/ Browser combinations. It identifies whether a web page is rendered identically across different browsers/platforms.

The advantages are several:                                      

• Multi functional On-demand solution.
• Ensures that the technologies used to develop your website are supported. across diverse browsers.
• Automated testing results in significant cost savings.
• Accelerate time-to-market.
• Higher ROI on projects.
• Broadens market by making site cross browser / platform compatible.
• Test large websites with short test windows.

On-demand Web based testing solution   
                                   
EssentiaBCT is a web-based customer experience testing tool that can test web pages across multiple browser/platform combinations.

Integrated planning module

Users can plan, create & manage tests effectively based on different testing needs.

Site-wide crawling

EssentiaBCT can crawl all the pages in a website and provide comprehensive statistics for all the URLs.


Functional module flexibility

Users can conveniently choose all tools or combinations of these tools as required and submit multiple URL’s for simultaneous testing.

Extensive browser and platform support

EssentiaBCT supports diverse browsers and platforms to test web pages for various combinations.

HTML validation

Identifies errors in the web page HTML code and compare them against HTML web standards.

Link tester

Tests if there are any inactive and broken links in the website using Link checker.

Automated Image Compare

Captures screen shots of web pages across different browsers/platforms to determine if the web pages are cross browser compatible.

In-browser functional testing

Test web pages and applications for functionality. Users create scripts for testing transactions in a website and test them across different browsers.  The same script can also work for all the browsers available with EssentiaBCT.

Compare tests

Re-execute the same test and compare the test results.

Analyze tests

Analyze test reports based on project/url suites/tools selected and visually compare those using graphs and charts.


Reporting

Helps you understand the underlying issues, which causes browser incompatibility:

• Project Wise Reports
• Tool Wise Reports
• Browser Wise Reports

Summary

Customer retention and improving user experience is at the core of EssentiaBCT. With EssentiaUnify, Essentia eKnow, users improve customer acquisition, retention and sales by finding and eliminating customer experience errors in websites. Essentia provides the industry’s first on-demand, scalable and flexible customer experience testing environment.

Teaming with Essentia

Essentia has expert teams, proven process and tools for automation, analysis, identification of problem pages focused automation for compatibility and statistical QA methods to build and execute a high confidence QA process for delivering exceptional Customer Experience Testing.

For further information, contact Essentia at info@essentia-corp.com and for business enquiries and pricing information contact sales@essentia-corp.com or call (281) 816 4676.

References

[1] "US Retail eCommerce Forecast", Forrester Research, Inc., 2006-2011, May 2007.

[2] Harris Interactive® (known for The Harris Poll®) fielded the online survey on behalf of Tealeaf between October 18 and 20, 2005 among a nationwide sample of 1,859 online U.S. adults ages 18 and over who have conducted an online transaction in the past year. (www.harrisinteractive.com)

[3] Browser Market Share from net applications.com
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2