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A little ecommerce snag yesterday

December 6th, 2007 by Kenric

Yesterday, I didn’t get one order on my ecommerce site.  I found that odd because traffic has been higher than ever.  Looking at my Google Analytics it looked like people were bailing right after they put in their credit card numbers.  So I did a sample purchase myself and found out that my site wasn’t working properly.

People couldn’t complete their purchase because something was wrong with the sessions on my site.  I’m not sure why it happened as I didn’t do anything to my site in the past 2 days.  I’m guessing I probably lost 3-5 orders over the past 2 days.  I was able to fix the issue after a few hours debugging but the lesson was learned.

I guess I have to perodically check out my site to make sure its working properly.  I could have easily just thought to myself that people weren’t buying from me. Yesterday I only got one order. I was a little suspicious and now I knew I should have went with my instinct and tested it.

When I used to work in the ebusiness division at CNA we had a team of testers test out the whole site every time when made a change.  We made changes at 9pm CST because that’s when traffic was at its minimum.  We performed the code migration and the testing team would run full site functionality tests for 2-3 hours. Anytime they found a bug, I’d call a developer and have them fix it, migrate and retest. We could only go to sleep when things were done. After all, we can’t have a broken site on air during business hours. This meant many late nights of being up to 4am. This was the crappy job that made me look at alternative methods of income and ultimately real estate investing. It’s ironic that now I’ve brought that job back upon myself. However, I’m enjoying this alot more because its my site and my business.

With a small site like mine, I’m not even sure if I should implement multiple environments.  Ideally, I should have a development environment to program and add new features and then a test environment to run general functionality tests.  But for now, I’ll just have to run my tests in production and hope I don’t fatally kill my site.

I would think that at a minimum I would have to test the following:

• Login
• Browse 2-3 items
• Create a new account
• Add to shopping cart
• Checkout with credit card

This would be considered my simple site check procedure.   After any code change, even if its a simple text change I would do a more thorough test.  Oh this brings back memories…

Posted in Ebiz | 3 Comments »
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