My husband is trying to order some decent products online. He’s made his selection, provided his details, given them his credit card info and submitted his order. The page then hangs and hangs and hangs and hangs. Re-submitting does exactly the same thing. He’s given up and gone elsewhere.
I wonder how many e-commerce sites put through dummy orders just to test their system. In the bricks and mortar world you make sure you unlock your door each day. The same should happen online.
The number of badly implemented or maintained e-com sites out there astounds me, the other common pitfall seems to be lack of polish eg if a search returns no items then the same page with no results is shown instead of a nice ‘no results’ message.
Simple things like making dummy orders or even visiting the webiste every few months just to have a little play or even pro-active maintanance such as monitoring traffic so quotas aren`t exceeded or maybe subtle copy changes based on search results are never done instead once the site is live it is abandoned to never see the developer again.
Unit testing is a nice long term strategy that I really wish I put more effort into implementing, it catches alot of these functional problems with very little effort.
P.S. Great blog keep up the great work!
Michael
Thanks for dropping by Michael and I’m glad you’re enjoying it!
> once the site is live it is abandoned to never see the developer again.
Sad but oh so true.