GEARing up for xmas—is your website or app ready?

Recently, I’ve witnessed retail shelves stocking up on the jolly old fat man just a week after Easter. Sporting his famous red suit and a very trendy beard, Santa begins his Xmas campaign rather early in the year.

Retailers love to get on board with the Chrissy cheer, and with a mere six months to go before Santa breaks into our homes, eats our goodies, and leaves our kids a bunch of toys that make a racket, you need to ask yourself one question:

Is your platform able to cope with the huge amount of traffic it’s about to receive in the lead up to Xmas?

The primary reason of having an active and well-designed website with a streamlined checkout process is clear, but what about utilising a smartphone app to update customers on your latest offers and on-the-go information? For the retail sector, the benefits are seemingly endless.

Don’t trip up during this critical seasonal period

While your new or improved app, website and/or shopping cart have passed all of your in-house tests, it may still fall short of meeting customer expectations. It may not seem fair, but if a customer is using your site or app and it is unable to offer up the answer they want or serve a purpose, you can pretty much say goodbye to the conversion. If the platform crashes or has bugs, you’ll also land in hot water. Through this, you can see just how important it is to have a solid testing process in place to ensure absolute success.

With crowdsourced testing, you are in the driver’s seat of who and what you target—location, demographical age and more. A critical factor to note here is that these are real people, giving a true depiction of your target market. Additionally, you can delegate operating systems and devices you’d like to conduct testing on.

Ultimately, the crowdsourcing vendor tester is in control of overseeing the whole process (for consistency and quality) for you—from validation through to reporting on any bugs or UX issues. The aim is that they do this at a fraction of the time and cost that traditional testing can take.

Ultimately, by getting this right, you’ll be able to fix up your platform and launch with a peace of mind, paving the way to a market share increase.