A good website with smooth operation is always preferred by customers. Customers never want to wait and have any problems throughout the shopping process. If there is any problem in the pick-up or payment steps, customers will suspect your store is a scam.
On the other hand, a problem website will affect customers’ purchasing decisions. There are a few different ways that you can test your store.
Test Your Checkout Process
The checkout process is one of the most important aspects of your Shopify online store. If there is any trouble in the checkout process, customers can think your store is scamming them. Then, they can claim your store from the bank if you do not refund them or believe your explanation.
This is why you need to ensure that your customers can easily complete their purchase with an email confirmation. To test your checkout process, you need to act like a real customer and go through all the checkout steps, from start to finish.
Remember to pay attention to each step and find out if there are any errors or glitches. After that, you need to make a note that you can fix it or contact the Shopify expert’s team to ask for help.
Test Shipping Methods And Charges
Another important aspect of your Shopify store that customers can be concerned about when shopping online is the shipping process. Customers always need a clear understanding of your online store’s shipping options and charges before they decide on the final purchase step.
You need to add some type of product to the cart and then enter a shipping address. Pay close attention to the weight of the products or the shipping fee if you are selling worldwide. Because the weight and shipping fee can be changed depending on the locations of your customers.
Make sure that everything looks correct and that there are no unexpected charges that affect your customers or your costs. You can use a shipping calculator to ensure everything goes the right way.
Test Your Store’s Template Design & Devices
The template design is what affects customers directly when they visit your store. Not only does it match your brand’s visual style, but it also needs to be smooth and bring a comfortable experience to every device.
In many research reports from marketing agencies, people choose mobile devices or tablets for shopping more than computers. That means you need to test your website on all devices that customers expect to use for shopping.
To test your store design, you need to pay attention to how it works on mobile, tablet, or computer. Remember to try out all of the different features, for example, the click motion effect works well on mobile devices and has no effect on the buying experience.
Especially, you need to test the small details like font, colour, spacing, and layout on devices to ensure they can appear clean and clear on both mobile and websites. For example, you need to check the font’s style, size, and colour to see if it is easy to read on mobile or not.
Additionally, you also need to test and note if the font of the text takes up a lot of screen space or not. So, you can summarise it into short sentences to make the device’s screen look more comfortable and have more stopping space while reading.
Take note of anything that gets into trouble or things you want to make more convenient for customers’ shopping experiences. Then, you can fix it by yourself or contact Shopify’s expert team and support app developers to ask for help.
Things To Remember While Testing
Firstly, you always need to see the preview of your Shopify store before publishing. A preview helps you see what your store looks like without making it live for the public. With the preview link, you can share it with your friends or family members, especially people who are potential customers, and ask them for some feedback.
Additionally, if you want to check after your website goes live, you can search your Shopify store on the search bar of search engine browsers like Google or Bing or in an incognito browser for testing without caches from history searches and visits.
Next, carefully check the Shopify policy to ensure that you are not selling or using an outsourced payment gateway that will affect your publishing process or your business cost budget.
Moreover, you can use tools or extensions for help while testing. Many tools are available for you to use to optimise your Shopify online store website with store speed, SEO, landing pages, etc. You can use them as support tools to save testing time.
Last, but not least, remember to test both the roles of customers and sellers. Test the shopping and purchasing process like a customer. Then, test the store management and order fulfillment processes like a seller.
Finally, always remind yourself that before a seller, you are a customer too. Bringing things you want as a customer to your potential consumers is the key to satisfying their shopping experience. Besides some important things that need to be tested above, let’s ask ourselves if there are any more problems you have encountered when shopping online. After that, you can take notes and fix it by yourself or connect to Shopify’s expert team through live chat or email to ask for help.
In Conclusion
There are many ways that you can test your Shopify online store before publishing it or making any changes during operation. These are some of the most important and basic things you need to test before your Shopify store goes live.
1 – Testing the checkout process and payment gateway like a customer.
2 – Testing and checking the shipping methods and charges to avoid problems with shipping costs and payment methods with customers.
3 – Testing your store design and how it works on different devices to ensure your customers will have the best shopping experience on your online store website.
Shopify is a complete e-commerce platform for online stores; however, nothing is always perfect. It is important to test your store, but it also has some risk that you can break something you do not know is in your store. This can affect your customers’ shopping experience and decrease the traffic that drives you to your website.
That means you need to know and understand how the Shopify platform works before you begin to test. Additionally, if you are not confident in your Shopify store testing, you can note some mistakes or things you want to test, then seek help from Shopify’s expert team.
