Effects of current pandemic on retail E-commerce!

The Coronavirus has changed how the world works dramatically in a matter of months. In fact, the pandemic has made “stay-at-home” and “work-from-home” norms, with many countries still following the protocol of lockdown and social distancing.

Meeting your friends at restaurants, shopping at retail stores, attending public events – all have stopped to a huge extent in the current times. Due to the fear of contracting the novel virus if they go out, people now are switching to e-commerce websites to get essential items, medical supplies and so on. As a result, there has been a huge surge in the e-commerce business in the last 4-5 months across the world.

The incredible surge in e-commerce industry

There has been an unprecedented difference seen in the shopping patterns of people across the world in recent times. With many retail shops being closed and social distancing becoming a norm, many people have turned to e-commerce platforms to buy everything, including daily essentials like grocery items and medical supplies. If the current trends are to be followed in the near future, the e-commerce market value in India is expected to reach $200 Billion by 2026 – a massive jump from the $38.6 Billion value in 2017. Similarly, all e-commerce industries around the world are seeing this incredible change.

The medical sector has benefited the most with the demand for medicines for flu, cold and cough, anti-bacterial sprays, face masks, sanitisers and so on seeing an exponential rise. A similar growth is seen in people buying grocery items from different retail e-commerce platforms. Even though the sale of electronics, clothing, footwear and other such things took a hit during the initial days of the pandemic, it is slowly but surely getting back to normal. Therefore, it is safe to say that the general trends suggest that online shopping is going to be the new norm in the coming years.

Why should retailers invest in building their own e-commerce platforms?

The current world scenario has almost made it inevitable for people to switch to digital mediums to buy things now. With people refraining from getting out of their house unless it is an emergency, most retail stores are not seeing even half of the usual footfall. Naturally, the smart way to go about generating revenue now would be to invest in your own e-commerce website so that you can continue selling your products even during the pandemic. One thing to note here is that the micro, small and medium-scale retailers have a lot more to benefit from making this switch as they get a wider audience.

Now that you know the importance of building your own e-commerce website during this time, let us have a look at a few things to keep in mind while doing so.

Things to keep in mind while building an e-commerce website during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Ensure that the e-commerce platform gives a seamless performance

If you have ever participated in online shopping, then you must know how irritating it can get if the e-commerce website does not give a seamless performance, and is filled with lags and other technical glitches. You may even end up not using that platform ever again. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to make sure that you build a website that gives a smooth performance. Be it a user still finding the product he/she had put in the cart even after a month or being able to apply the necessary filters while searching for a product, all these things matter if you want to give your customer a great experience.

Furthermore, an e-commerce website should be prepared to handle a lot of users at a time. This is why you need to build a website that performs well under all user-case scenarios. To ensure all this, the best thing to do would be to hire professional testers to perform load, performance and functional testing on your website, before launching it.

Ensure secure digital transactions

One of the biggest red flags for any e-commerce platform is the delay that occurs during an online transaction. People often end up stopping the transaction, fearing a loss of information or not finding the payment gateway secure. This is why you should ensure that you incorporate an efficient payment processing system that does not take more than a few seconds to complete the transaction. With innumerable devices connected to the same system, there is also a threat of a cyber-attack. To stay safe from such a scenario, you must definitely hire professionals to perform end-to-end security testing on your website.

Improve Customer Experience by using AI/ML

You must use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to your advantage to read consumer behaviour and ensure they come across products they would most certainly like. Furthermore, you should incorporate all the latest AI-based features that people expect in such platforms. A team of efficient and experienced developers and testers can help you by integrating such features in your website and checking for their efficiency.

Post regular updates on the platform

When someone purchases something online, the most basic thing they expect to get back in return is a follow-up regarding the same. People expect to receive an instant confirmation of the order being placed on the website. They prefer to track the progress of their order and want to know by when they can expect the delivery. This is where you need to have a robust system where the customer can gain access to all such information readily. To ensure efficiency on this front, you need to switch to remote testing and crowd-sourced testing so that the functionality of the website can be checked under different real-world conditions.

With the world accepting this new lifestyle, people are surely switching towards buying things from an online store rather than a physical retail store. This is the ideal time for you to build your own e-commerce website and test it under all conditions to ensure its quality. To get the best testing services, contact TestUnity, a company that uses testers from around the world to ensure maximum quality for your digital product.  

TestUnity

Testunity is a SaaS-based technology platform driven by a vast community of testers & QAs spread around the world, powered by technology & testing experts to create the dedicated testing hub. Which is capable of providing almost all kind of testing services for almost all the platforms exists in software word.