Contents
1. What should Retail industry CEOs Look for in 2024?
2. What are the Generic Challenges Faced by Retail Businesses?
3. What are the Common Software (Application) Challenges Faced by Retailers?
4. Software Testing for Retail
5. What are the testing services required for Retail Apps?
6. What are the Benefits Retailers Get with Effective Software Testing?
7. Conclusion

In recent years with rapid digitalization across business sectors, the Retail industry has been the most impacted by these digitization moves. The Retail segment mainly delivers an omnichannel experience. This includes a user-friendly and stable customer experience at the front end and a load of transaction data at the back-end. The retail segment software includes inventory, CRM apps, data warehousing, e-commerce channels, supply chain management, and Point of sale (POS) systems, etc. Undoubtedly, the effective working of retail software drives the return on investment (ROI) for retailers.

Especially, for the retail industry, the customer experience is at the center of their business. A poor quality experience at the storefront or with mobile apps that process the payment transactions would greatly impact customer experience and affects their business bottom line!

Also, the retail marketplace centered over POS needs to satisfy customers by delivering effective user experience. This can be achieved by a specialized POS testing process, else it has a significant impact on overall retail business outcomes.

What should Retail industry CEOs Look for in 2024?

• Digital readiness to deliver an exceptional customer experience (CX)

• Deliver high-quality solutions to best meet consumer behavior with early-to-market

• Data and insights-driven approach to digital eCommerce and omnichannel presence

• Focus on products for better performance and sustainability by adopting proper market approaches to appeal to the audience (especially Millennials & Gen Z)

• Process automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and data analytics to help eCommerce & retail businesses achieve more by enhancing solutions with improved CX

• Introduce effective business models that drive higher ROI and, at the same time, innovate with new services and offerings to meet ever-growing customer demand

Today, the retail sector is constantly changing and there are new challenges faced by all players. The challenges are faced at both the business as well as application level. These challenges should be properly fixed to ensure retail business success.

Overview of Present Retail Sector

For today’s businesses, the online channel has evidently become the most effective platform to perform their business transactions. Every business domain continues to take the complete advantage of online marketing to enchant their customers. Evidently, internet retailing has become a modern pathway for shopping to many internet surfers and online users. The increase in the usage of mobile phones, e-commerce, and internet services has truly simplified shopping means and effectively multiplied the scope of online shopping.

Over the past few years, online retailing is trending and accounting to over 1.5% sales across the globe. This is because of the available easy shopping ways being enabled through mobile apps, online channels and the availability of umpteen online payment and transaction methods. Among the many industry types that are emerging today, retail is one of the finest and fastest-growing sectors. It is the industry where products or services are provided for consumers by following a set of selling methods or practices. Also, it is the sector that is experiencing year-over-year progress.

The main reason why the retail sector is receiving the prominence is due to the changing lifestyle of the people and the increased dependency on obtaining services and products with ease. The need for retail services is tremendously increasing and the statistical report prepared for the total worldwide retail sales is a clear example with a total number of retails estimated over trillion dollars for the coming years.

As per the Global Retail Industry Analysis, in 2017 the retail industry was valued at USD 23,460 billion, but this effective number has been gradually increasing and during the period 2018-2023, it is aimed to reach USD 31,880.8 billion. This is because the retail markets have become more competitive and are excelling to target many developed and small countries to expand their consumer base. Also, the retail giants are preferring the online mode to follow their consumers and provide them the best offers that can result in future sales and increase their brand reputation with the usage of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Internet channels help in increasing the production and as well introduce several other complications for the retail sector. It has become essential for the retail sector to choose mobile technology and leverage proper infrastructure to deliver the best customer experience.

Though the retail segment has been expanding in recent years, it continues to face certain challenges that have been categorized as generic challenges and application-level challenges.

What are the Generic Challenges Faced by Retail Businesses?

• Challenges faced while embracing in the facet of digital transformation across lines of business
• Maintaining customer loyalty continues to be an important challenge for the retailer's success
• Delivering a good customer experience is a major factor to uphold their brand and protect their business
• Keeping up with the ever-changing customer expectations is another critical factor of concern
• Seasonal trends influence customers, and retailers need to balance to upkeep their customer shopping experience both online and offline
• Adopting new technology solutions for the retail industry is an important challenge to deliver secure and safe transactions
• New innovation trends of Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) continue to have a great impact on the retail sector

What are the Common Software (Application) Challenges Faced by Retailers?

• App performance issues negatively affect customer experience and damages brand loyalty
• Security glitches while processing transactions across e-commerce channels also disengages customer from using them
• Customers continue to abandon apps due to payment processing delays
• Increased/Heavy app loading time also adversely affects customer experience
• App usability plays an important role, as complex navigation flows will refrain users from using i

Software Testing for Retail

Primarily, in e-commerce websites and apps, any sort of design issues can greatly hinder business growth. As customers demand the latest features, the online channels failing to deliver these, suffer from customers disengaging.

Any sort of performance and security issues prevailing in online shopping apps adversely affects the customer experience. Hence, in order to overcome these challenges, retailers must adopt effective software quality assurance. The Next-gen software testing services will ensure and deliver a great customer experience.

What are the testing services required for Retail Apps?

An Overview of the Retail App Features and the corresponding testing service required to achieve Quality at speed

• Retail apps are generally integrated with several external hardware and software peripherals. There is a need for thorough functional testing and non-functional testing services
• Retail apps user interface (UI) and business processes change frequently. Hence they need thorough testing with automated regression testing
• Retail apps are integrated with various payment systems which need payment gateway integration testing
• Security testing is essential as customers across their digital journey need fast, effective, safe and secure transactions
• Retail apps require a digital assurance and testing strategy which can be applied to ensure apps perform stably under varying loads
• E-commerce channels should deliver great user experience for which usability testing should be taken up
• Retail apps testing needs embracing Test automation frameworks to test various scenarios of the application with test automation tools
• Test automation helps to deliver faster releases within shorter timelines which helps software developers and QA teams to deliver faster.

What are the Benefits Retailers Get with Effective Software Testing?

Benefits to customers

• Improves customer experience across the e-commerce channel as the application becomes glitch-free
• Quicker development is ensured as defects are identified early in the SDLC
• Improves business outcomes as new features are thoroughly tested before go-to-market
• Enhances user experience with great UI and stable performance with load testing across the e-commerce channels
• The application becomes accessible to one and all and achieves accessibility norms

Benefits to Businesses

• Considerable cost savings assured as faster releases are ensured by embracing test automation
• Reduced time to market as faster releases are achieved with DevOps Continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD)
• Reduced human intervention as test automation is leveraged
• Efficient and comprehensive reports deliver quality insights
• Faster time to market results in a quicker return on investment (RoI)

Conclusion

Retail business use cases are not identical as the retail industry cannot be generalized, unlike other sectors. There is a huge challenge involved in combining retail software with wide integrations all through. This all requires attention to detail and an effective focus on quality.

Hence, testing e-commerce applications is critical to drive online sales and deliver a great user experience. It also makes sure the website or the apps on mobile devices are globally available and accessible to all. Therefore, an effective end-to-end digital testing is essential for retail software.

Leverage our experts with domain knowledge in digital testing to achieve quality retail software. Connect with our automated testing services team.