Continuous Performance Testing for Retail

The 2020 holiday season is shaping up to be the biggest wave of online shopping in history. With fewer customers in brick-and-mortar stores, and more turning to web and mobile applications, online retail systems will be busier and more stressed than ever.

Digital Excellence Is Do-or-Die for Retail

Unprecedented Traffic Spikes to Come

The pandemic has radically changed consumer behavior. The digital-first “new normal” will impact the 2020 holiday season: fewer in-store purchases, more web and mobile traffic, etc.

On peak shopping days (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day), frontend traffic is upwards of 3X more than usual — and backend load increases by 10X or more.

Sudden, intense bursts of buying stress eCommerce systems — e.g., the four hours of 7–11PM on Cyber Monday see more sales than any other full day of the year.

Main Street Goes Digital

Geographical retail performance is worth millions — 57% of online consumers worldwide buy from retailers based in another country.

Everyone expects integrated multi-device user experience: 85% of shoppers start a purchase on one device (e.g., desktop) and actually finish it on another (e.g., mobile).

Mobile sales grew by 68% last year and is expected to overtake other channels as the #1 source of all sales this year.

Slow Is the New Downtime

Customer expectations are higher than ever. Over half of visitors abandon a website that takes longer than three seconds to load — and 80% of them will never come back.

Salesforce found that 57% stop buying from a company because a competitor provides a better experience, and Google research shows that 40% go elsewhere after a poor mobile experience.

And the lost revenue: a 2019 ITIC report found that downtime for retail costs over $83,000 per minute. The impact is even greater during the holiday shopping season, which is about 20-30% of annual retail revenue.

As Fast as the Slowest Component

Potential bottlenecks are anywhere. Every customer transaction hits at least 82 different technologies, customized API services, plugins and third-party integrations from internal business processes to the cloud.

Testing the performance of interrelated backend systems — CRM, fulfillment/shipping, warehouse, invoicing, etc. — is either too complex for basic tools or requires specialized expertise.

Retailers moving to multi-cloud or hybrid environments must ensure that performance doesn’t regress and that scale doesn’t replace performant code. Because scalability is never free.

Performance Testing Kit for Retail

Learn how performance testing helps deliver a better ecommerce experience for your customers

What’s in this kit?

Casestudy • Whitepaper • Webinar • Infographic • Blog

Get Your Kit

NeoLoad Natively Supports Performance Testing Retail Applications

We support whatever modern and legacy technologies you need to test — from packaged digital commerce platforms to custom-built mobile and web application ecosystems.

All Technologies

Why Retail Companies Choose NeoLoad

Trust in the test: more realistic peak testing and confidence in go/no-go decisions.
NeoLoad simplifies advanced, “extreme” load tests for both web and mobile.
Test cycles are accelerated by 65-75%, on average.
Time, effort and cost of maintaining/updating tests get reduced by as much as 90%.
Cloud-testing resource costs are cut by up to 80% by dynamically right-sizing cloud infrastructure.
Teams of all skill levels can do more themselves and to avoid backlog bottlenecks with easy-to-use low-code/no-code approaches.
Every team, from DevOps to COEs, uses the same standardized platform.
Automated performance testing is integrated seamlessly into DevOps methodologies.
A higher return on investment is realized sooner.

Retailers Use NeoLoad to Perform Fast at Scale

Confidence in your holiday readiness.

NeoLoad gives you the best available combination of speed and accuracy — fewer false positives, more predictability — to run a greater volume and variety of tests to ensure the speed, scalability and stability of your system under the heaviest traffic.

Make CX a competitive advantage.

Customers expect great digital experience between different types of devices — anytime, anywhere. NeoLoad’s continuous performance testing platform catches more performance issues early, before they become customer problems.

65-70% faster release cycles.

Test fast to release fast. Whether updating a packaged eCommerce platform or introducing new microservices, NeoLoad’s automation and low-code/no-code approaches enable delivery teams to get releases out the door faster.

No experts needed.

NeoLoad’s easy drag-and-drop, point-and-click approach empowers teams without specialized programming expertise to design, maintain and execute automated go/no-go performance tests — with guardrails already in place.

Automated, actionable bottom-line insight.

NeoLoad’s automated reporting gives developers test results immediately, not in days. Seamless integration with leading APM solutions (Dynatrace, AppD, New Relic, etc.) helps pinpoint bottlenecks and show business stakeholders the impact of performance issues.

Cloud-agnostic technology.

NeoLoad is cloud-native and multi-cloud-integrated. No matter what your cloud environment looks like or where you are on your cloud journey, cloud performance testing is faster, easier and more cost-effective with NeoLoad.

Autonomous performance testing.

Test early and often, fixing performance issues before they ever see the light of day. On-prem or in the cloud, NeoLoad is DevOps-ready to integrate continuous performance testing into automated CI/CD pipelines (Bamboo, Jenkins, etc.).

Retail and cloud plugins, APIs at scale.

NeoLoad’s ease of use, speed and automation simplify testing third-party integrations and custom APIs — payment processing, inventory, checkout, shipping, recommendation engine, etc. — to ensure end-to-end performance.

More value out of your IT ecosystem.

NeoLoad integrates into whatever technologies you’re using and amplifies the existing toolset — out-of-the-box integration with functional testing, version control, CI/CD, APM tools and multiple cloud vendors makes NeoLoad a force multiplier throughout the software factory.

Control cloud costs.

Access actionable insights on all layers of the cloud services, from infrastructure to application, to continuously ensure cloud KPIs meet SLOs — and that you’re not overspending on cloud resources.

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