You've created the best online store for your business – at least that was your intention. Now you need to have a Quality Assurance (QA) tester examine if your site is running properly. As beneficial as Shopify can be for sales, it's difficult to fully analyze how individual shops are operating. Here are the top reasons why it can be difficult to test the success of your site.

Complexity

One of the greatest advantages of Shopify is that it gives shop owners the flexibility to choose how their e-commerce site operates, appears and if they want to use complex features. Unfortunately that flexibility makes it challenging to have a simple and universal testing plan that examines if a shop is running properly. Instead, a QA tester will often have to do the time-consuming task of reading the shop's documentation so that they can understand their theme and service.

Third Party Integration

Shopify themes come with features that are capable of creating a good-looking and working shop. But often clients want to take it one step further by installing and integrating different applications in order to achieve their desired goal. For example, they may add shipping carriers, payment gateways, and marketing tools. The functionality of these apps can be difficult to test as they have their own requirements and limitations. As with the Shopify themes, a QA would also need to read the installed application's in-depth documentation to ensure it's running properly.

Customization

Sometimes clients realize they need more than what is offered by apps and Shopify themes. In response, they will have customized themes created to complete the desired look of their store. These can be challenging to test because they often include complex code that is hard to examine and debug. They also require a lot of testing to make the added features flawlessly interact with the commonly used Shopify themes.

Ongoing Updates

Every three months Shopify releases API updates that optimize the performance of their platform. Customers have to pay attention to these updates because ignoring them can lead to deprecated API's that could potentially hinder or break the created code. Once the API is updated, the QA team will need to retest the entire shop to ensure that everything works and looks as it should. This repetitive QA process can be very tiring.

Conclusion

The wonderful flexibility of Shopify comes with its flaws. It's important that online store owners are aware of how much QA they are able to maintain before adding apps or customized themes.  As e-commerce continues to evolve, it's inevitable that QA testing will become more simplified and that Shopify will develop a user-friendly tool for testing. Until then, it's best to understand the limitations of your business and to create a plan for tracking the function of your site. If you need support with creating digital strategy, reach out to us at Slicedbread.