Comments on: Customer focused eCommerce: Volume testing techniques

By: The 5 Most Popular Merchant Stand Posts of 2009 « The Merchant Stand from Bob Williams

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:51:53 +0000

[...] 2. Customer focused eCommerce: Volume testing techniques – A summary of how organizations can use performance testing, load testing, and stress testing to achieve better customer focus from their eCommerce portfolio. [...]

By: Bob Williams

Bob Williams — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:10 +0000

Hi Scott. Site failure impact would be determined by several factors including:
* Amount of downtime
* Average orders received during that day of the week and time of day
* Average value of the orders received during that time
* Marketing campaigns that promote special options on the site during the time. This could add traffic above established baseline. Use an expected return rate on the number of promotional ads sent to people.
* The likelihood that customers will wait-out the failure and return instead of going to a competitor.
* Average number of new visitors to a site during that day of the week and time. The outage could have a residual effect because if prospective buyers have a bad experience on your site the first time they use it, then they won’t likely return.

The bottom two statistics may be harder to quantify and defend. However, I would expect with standard web analytics tools and financial reporting you could multiply out these statistics to show the value in minimizing risk through some form of volume testing.

By: Scott Price

Scott Price — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:55:00 +0000

Well done Bob! Good thoughts on volume testing.

As an e-Commerce Marketing executive, do you have any statistics or supporting data regarding the financial impact of site failure? For example, the wasted marketing dollars when the site goes down under too many concurrent users, especially when caused by a splendid marketing campaign that is wildly successful in driving traffic.

It is great to have your perspective because most of the people I interact with regarding load testing are developers or QA professionals. I put up a blog post pointing to this article. Feel free to check for any errors or misquotes. http://loadstorm.com/2009/performance-testing-ecommerce-perspective

Thank you for sharing.