The holiday season is approaching (hurray!) and that means that the online shopping season is also coming up. The prime of this season are Black Friday and Cyber Monday, to take place this year on November 25th and 28th, 2016, respectively.

The trend to online sales is noticeable and here to stay, with most 50 % of holiday shopping done online, and mobile now plays a huge part of the mix. In 2015, online sales be $ 2.74 billion. That & # x27; s 21.5 % more than 2014. The average pageviews per second increase by 109 %, and mobile traffic exceeded the 50 % line and form as 57.2 % of all online traffic.

2016 number are look to be even higher. That makes signified - it ’ s more commodious to buy from the solace of your home, and if one website crashes from eminent level of traffic, customers can easily move on to another.

To make sure you & # x27; re ready and you don & # x27; t leave money on the table, we recommend you conduct the following tests on your website or app. Cross browser and load examination can be run and analyzed quickly and easily, so you withal experience time to see bugs, errors and bottlenecks, and fix them in clip for Black Friday (and Cyber Monday!)

Cross Browser Testing

Few things can be more frustrating for busy online shopper than going through a shopping workflow only to arrive at a checkout page that merely sit there after the & quot; Buy & quot; push has be clicked. Sometimes it can be as innocuous as a barely obtrusive browser alert indicating that a pop-up window has been blocked, more oftentimes it & # x27; s a client who is using an older browser/OS combination that was not included in the functional examination specification. While some dauntless shopper will think to fire up the site in another browser and go through the process all o'er again to see if it will work, most will just quit in frustration and leave the e-retailer with money on the table.

As the holiday shopping season is often the flexion point for annual profitability for many retailers (the & quot; black & quot; inBlack Friday) any shopping experience that fail because of incompatibility with the consumer & # x27; s desktop or mobile contour is easy money down the drain. Unlike a number of diligence, e-commerce retailer have to expand reportage to as many browser/OS combinations as possible. If the product team is looking at traffic analytics and testing for the browser/OS/device configurations that account for 90 % of website traffic, it & # x27; s possible that up to 10 % of shoppers are unable to successfully pilot the website or peregrine app. Think of it as a new pattern of retailshrinkage.

Fortunately, it ’ s easier than always before to test your site and mobile app across a wide array of browser, OS, and mobile configurations. Just as significantly, many web development teams recognize that ensuring cross browser compatibility is important to the health of the web - and to dwell up to the “ codification as craft ” manifesto - here ’ s a great post from Justin Scott, Chris Mills and Ali Spivak at Mozilla, “Make The Web Work For Everyone”.

So, how do you get started? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Map your most critical purchase workflows and prioritize the growth of these examination cases.

2. Purchase workflow are business-facing decisions - consider use to help define your testing strategy and write your exam cases.

   SUSA automates exploratory testing with persona-driven behavior, catching bugs that scripted automation misses.

3. Use Google Analytics to understand which browsers, OS and wandering device your audience use, and then rank these in priority order when determining cross browser reporting goals

4. Use a cross browser testing platform like to afford you access to over 800 different browser, OS and mobile configurations, along with secure, on-demand scalability to run these tests in parallel.

Load Testing

Testing your browser is all-important for user experience and making sure dealings are completed, but the testing process isn & # x27; t complete without consignment testing. Black Friday and Cyber Monday bring traffic spikes and peak, and performance try ensures your site and app can handle the heavy holiday load and traffic spikes.

How does it work? Load testing simulates user behavior by a declamatory number of virtual users and traffic from multiple geo-locations. It also permit you quickly run tests in different frequencies. Then, you can analyze different(https: //www.blazemeter.com/blog/understanding-your-reports-part-2-kpi-correlations? utm_source=saucelabs & amp; utm_medium=g_blog & amp; utm_campaign=test-browser-traffic-loads-holiday-season) like average response time and throughput, enable you to discover(https: //www.blazemeter.com/blog/understanding-your-reports-part-4-how-read-your-load-testing-reports-blazemeter? utm_source=saucelabs & amp; utm_medium=g_blog & amp; utm_campaign=test-browser-traffic-loads-holiday-season) and notice out where your bottlenecks are.

This is crucial since a crashed website can lead to losing money and thwarted customers. On Black Friday in 2014, Best Buy & # x27; s site was down for an hour, as a result of increased mobile traffic. In 2015, John Lewis & # x27; s website went down and psychoanalyst predict this price them up to £2.8m. But this doesn & # x27; t hold to be the case., a fashion retailer, prepared for a huge traffic spike when they signed up Rihanna for their new sock collection. By load test in advance on their new base and assume 10x their normal traffic, they be ready to prepare their site on time.

Here are 4 quick load testing tips ((http: //info.blazemeter.com/holiday_load_testing_wp? utm_source=saucelabs & amp; utm_medium=g_blog & amp; utm_campaign=test-browser-traffic-loads-holiday-season)):

1. Make sure you charge test the consummate stack, include the surrounding infrastructure. This assure the testing is as accurate as possible.

2. Create and model real world exploiter experience - create scenarios accord to your user use. A real world test eliminates real bottlenecks that could occur.

3. Run load trial from the product environment - to see your testing is accurate and that each point is tested decent. We recommend you choose a clip you know traffic is low, and simulate heaps from multiple geo-locations and surroundings.

4. You can load test on different unfastened root tools likeJMeter. (http: //info.blazemeter.com/request-a-demo2? utm_source=saucelabs & amp; utm_medium=g_blog & amp; utm_campaign=test-browser-traffic-loads-holiday-season) enables larger scalability, run through the cloud, enables collaboration and has intelligent reporting abilities.

Continuous Integration

While it ’ s significant to test before the vacation season, there is no replacement to continuous testing and uninterrupted bringing. “ Shifting left ” will lower your price and ameliorate product quality year-round. Incorporating tools like Sauce Labs and CA BlazeMeter, ensure you are always ready.

Click hither to get ready with a cross browser quiz or load testing demo.