Retail Application Testing: What It Is & Why Your App Needs It

Let’s talk numbers:

In 2023, global retail e-commerce sales reached an estimated 5.8 trillion U.S. dollars. Projections indicate a 39% growth in this figure over the coming years, expected to surpass eight trillion dollars by 2027. Source

In 2024, 20.1% of retail purchases are expected to take place online, and the global eCommerce market is projected to reach $6.3 trillion. Source

The global e-commerce market is expected to total $4.8 trillion in 2025.

By 2027, about 23% of total retail sales will happen online. Source

.Be it Alibaba, eBay, Etsy, Target, Myntra, Amazon, or Flipkart, retail apps will continue to drive increasing percentages of retail purchases.

In this context, we must discuss retail application testing. If you, an e-commerce business owner, app creator or tester, intend to sell something online, your website/app must provide only the most seamless user experience. Otherwise, there are hundreds of options you customers can choose from. Expect a glitchy app to be immediately uninstalled and deleted.

This article will serve as a 101-style guide into retail app testing — it’s definition, necessity, benefits, types, a quick tutorial, and, of course, real-world examples.

What is Retail App Testing?

Retail app testing, comprises a set of processes and tests that monitor and verify it’s digital infrastructure, usability and user experience. It covers everything from Point of Sale (POS) systems, inventory management, and e-commerce platforms to customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

A common example of a retail testing scenario would be the following:

• You log into your e-commerce app.
• You scroll through the showcased products.
• You pick a couple of items and add them to the cart.
• The app notifies you that you are eligible for a 10% discount based on the final bill.
• You’re excited, and try to checkout. But you see that the discount is not applied.
• You have to pay full price despite being promised a reduction.

Such a scenario would greatly tarnish an application’s user experience and swiftly earn it one or two star reviews on the Google Play Store or the App Store. Comprehensive retail application testing, however, would detect and eliminate such errors before the app even hits production.

What Counts as a Retail Application?

Retail application refers to all apps and computing systems designed to facilitate tasks common within retail businesses: sales, inventory management, customer relationship management (CRM), accounting, and point of sale (POS) operations.

Examples:

• POS operations: Shopify
• Sales: Amazon
• Inventory Management: Zoho
• CRM: Salesforce
• Accounting: QuickBooks

Any app that helps organize daily operations for retail businesses, provides features or insight for better decision-making and tracks performance across departments and verticals will count as retail software.

Why is Retail App Testing Essential for Brands and Testing Teams?

Retail application testing should feature as an integral element in the QA pipelines of brands for multiple reasons:

• Helps maintain omnichannel brand presence: Customers will make purchases from the avenue that is most convenient for them. Some prefer ordering via the website, some like the app, some like to order via WhatsApp, and others like to shop in person at the store.
  Retail testing ensures that each of these touchpoints (including the inventory management and payment apps used in the store) work flawlessly. No matter the user’s digital preference, your brand should be able to cater to it without missing a beat.

• Inculcates smooth customer experiences: The first step to offering a seamless UX is to eliminate glitches. The most interesting design and witty content won’t do much if your app can’t perform basic functions quickly and smoothly.

Retail app testing finds and highlights performance gaps, security loopholes, downtime issues, slow loading times, frequency of crashes, payment malfunctions and technological challenges that get in the way of a great customer experience.

• Optimizes software performance: Taking from the previous point, retail app testing contributes to better app performance by identifying issues getting in the way of perfect program execution. Often, retail testing often finds issues within the PoS (Point of sale) — a crucial entity within the digital retail ecosystem. This system needs to be integrated with supply chains, inventory and other software to complete purchases and deliveries successfully.

It is especially important to test retail systems with increased traffic and transaction loads. This ensures that the software will not crash or deliver adverse experiences during usage surges and peaks.

• Simplifies scalability as the app grows: No matter the domain, your team and software need to keep up with changing customers habits, behaviors, and expectations. Often, your dev team has to code and implement new features and capabilities within short timelines (often just weeks). Retail testing helps validate these features as quickly as possible, so that your brand can reap their benefits without having to deal with customer complaints about glitches & bugs.

• Ensures uncompromising security: More apps = more users feeding personal data = higher threats of data breach, theft and misuse.

Data privacy is a concern for more online customers than ever before, and their trust in brands is on its way down. Your app cannot afford to leave any customer data unprotected; even a single breach can risk serious reputational failure in the market.

Retail testing covers the verification of security mechanisms. It checks that personal data — name, date of birth, address, any identity-related information, bank details, credit card numbers — is always guarded against unwanted exposure and acquisition. It scans data entry points, system integrations and network interfaces to ensure that no gaps exist to be exploited by hackers and cybercriminals.

• Examines integrity of third-party integrations: Most retail apps require integrations with third-party services (payment apps, social media apps, etc.) to provide a holistic user experience. Since these integrations are outside the brand’s internal code base, they provide far too many opportunities for errors and bugs. Retail tests emphasize end-to-end verification of an app’s complete functional and non-functional offerings. In other words, it answers the question, “So, how does the app work?” in the most exhaustive way possible.

Types of Retail App Testing

Functional Testing

Functional tests ensure that the retail app’s core features are working as expected in requirements documents. As an example, consider the checkout process in an e-commerce app. Functional tests will check that the prices of items in the car are reflected in the total amount and that any relevant discounts and promotions are applied accurately. It will also check that once the customer initiates payment, it is accomplished without any hassle or data vulnerabilities.

Performance Testing

Performance tests check that the software system can handle the pressure of increased traffic and transactions, especially during holidays and events like Black Friday and Christmas. By replicating an increased traffic flow, testers can check that the site/app remains stable and/or is able to complete purchases and checkout flows without issues.

Security Testing

Retail apps store sensitive data like credit card information, UPI usernames, and so on. This data has to be encrypted during transactions and guarded against common attacks like SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS) incursions. Security tests check if these safeguards are indeed in place and working across the board to protect customer data (and meet regulatory requirements).

Usability Testing

Your retail app could be a technical marvel, but if it’s usable, it’ll fail in the real-world. Usability tests verify that the site’s layout is intuitive and all functions (search, filter, select, checkout) work smoothly. The POS system should also be easy to use, especially during business times. All images should render quickly and in the desired resolution.

These tests directly contribute to curating a satisfying user experience and keeping them interested in your software product in the long term.

End-to-End Testing

End-to-end testing checks — as the name suggests — that the app is working perfectly end-to-end. In other words, it monitors all systems and ferrets out obvious and non-obvious bottlenecks.

For example, let’s say someone orders an item on an app but chooses in-store pickup instead of delivery. End-to-end tests will evaluate if the online order system is able to coordinate with the store’s inventory management protocols and POS setup. It will also check if the system updates stock levels and actively informs the staff of the pickup order and time.

Benefits of Retail Application Testing

• Better overall customer experience: Retail testing checks for common issues that would otherwise disrupt user experience. It finds and highlights glitches in the POS system, pricing, product catalogues and essential functions.
• Validates the efficacy of integrations: Verifies that the POS, inventory, CRM, online commerce and payment systems communicate as expected. Retail testing also examines the level of data consistency across relevant channels to prevent discrepancies in information.
• Improved data protection: Retail tests check a site’s compliance with PCI-DSS standards in order to transact payments securely. These tests scan for vulnerabilities and gaps that hackers can exploit and also ensure compliance with GDPR and other essential regulations.
• Enhanced efficiency in daily operations: Glitch and bug-free software work better and faster, which increases efficiency across entire operational pipelines. Real-time inventory updates and minimal downtime keep brands from making customers wait or causing complaints and bad reviews. It also helps maintain software stability during peak shopping seasons.
• Cost reduction and healthier budgets: The earlier you detect issues, the quicker they can be fixed. Retail testing, right from the development stage, prevents expensive debugging operations before or even after release. If they test on real devices (via a device cloud such as the one offered by Testgrid), you can identify and eliminate bugs with reliable, 100% accuracy.

This keeps testing budgets down and delivers higher ROI in the long run.

• Regulatory Compliance and Assurance: Many of retail testing’s sub-tests help examine and clear attributes that are needed to keep the software a legal entity. Most emphatically, security tests included in any retail pipeline are essential to help software meet the demands of data protection laws such as GDPR and SOC2.

Step-by-Step Guide to Perform Retail App Testing

Step 1: Requirement Analysis

Identify the functions and features that must be verified via retail testing. This usually includes the POS pipeline, customer data handling, integration with payment systems, etc. Define the use cases, i.e., common test scenarios: purchase, return, refund, discount redemption, loyalty point redemption.

Don’t forget to list the laws and regulations (such as PCI-DSS and GDPR) your app must comply with.

Step 2: Test Planning

Define the scope; what features and systems need to be tested — inventory, CRM, dashboarding? Select the tests to be run and assign resources to your testing team.

Finally, set entry and exit criteria — parameters for when testing begins and when it ends.

Step 3: Test Case Design

Break down the test scenarios into specific and detailed test steps. For example,

Scan product barcode → Add to cart → Apply discount

Create the necessary datasets for tests. In this context, your test data will include customer profiles, product info, and sales promotions, such as discounts. Next, map the requirements with the specific test cases, and then assign software resources to ensure wide enough coverage.

Step 4: Test Environment Setup

Set up the test environment by installing the retail app within your staging portal. Be it POS, CRM or inventory management, you’ll have to connect components like payment gateways, e-commerce platforms, and inventory databases.

Once you’ve integrated with these systems, simulate the hardware components — POS terminals, barcode scanners, receipt printers, mobile payment devices.

Finally, load test data — sample inventory, customer details, and sales data — into the environment.

Step 5: Functional Testing

Start with unit tests. Verify individual modules like billing and product searches right at the coding stage. Next, move onto the workflows (say, the flow from purchase to generating receipts), and check that they work perfectly from beginning to end.

Finally, create user profiles based on different roles — cashier, store manager, inventory specialist — and check that access to features depends on the role-based credentials.

Step 6: Integration Testing

Start with verifying that the POS, CRM, inventory and payment systems sync as required. Next, check how the APIs behave when they interact with external vendors such as Amazon or Razorpay. Finally, confirm that data remain consistent across every part of the funnel. For example, check that changes in stock levels are immediately reflected on all channels.

Step 7: Performance Testing

First, run load tests. Replicate a large number of user logins, page views, actions and transactions. Next, test the system under major loads, such as those on flash sales or festival days. Your system should be able to handle growth by adding more stores, products and transactions.

Step 8: Security Testing

Verify that your payment system is compliant with PCI-DSS standards to manage card-based transactions. Encryption engines should be in place to protect sensitive data during storage and transfer. Consider simulating commonly used cyberattacks on your system to double check it’s security mechanisms in action.

Step 9: User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

Reach out to a number of end-users (store staff, customers, and staff managers) and engage them to test the app’s functions and usability. Run the app through real-world operations such as actual transactions, returns and exchanges.

Create extensive feedback systems so that testers can explain their impressions as clearly as possible.

Step 10: Bug Tracking and Re-testing

Ensure that your test management systems feature adequate mechanisms for logging bugs and documenting defects and their (possible) causes. A tool like Jira would work perfectly.

Label bugs by severity (critical, major, minor) before assigning them to developers for resolution.

Once the fixes are implemented, re-test the module and run regression tests to verify that the fixes have not destabilized existing functions.

Step 11: Final Reporting and Approval

Curate the final test summary report. Populate it with numbers and details on test coverage, number of defects identified, pass/failure rate, and metrics used to measure success. Once all stakeholders approve of the findings and completion rates, the app is ready for deployment.

Step 12: Post-Deployment Testing

Continue to monitor the app’s performance in the hands of actual end-users. Run smoke tests to track key functions like payment and checkout, and use monitoring tools to observe system behavior in the live environment.

Examples of Retail Application Tests

Testing a Retail POS System

Scenario: A clothing vendor is installing a new POS system to integrate with their inventory management operations, payment portal and customer loyalty protocols.

Objective: Check that all individual modules work as expected after being integrated.

Test Case: Verify customer checkout at the POS terminal

Test Steps:

• Scan barcode of two products.
• Apply 15% cart discount.
• Redeem customer loyalty points.
• Pay by credit card by actively choosing this option at the payment stage.
• Print receipt of successful transaction.

Expected Results:

POS displays the accurate total price after applying a discount.

Appropriate loyalty points are deducted from the customer’s balance.

Printed receipts contain accurate information — product details, discount, payment method.

Testing an Inventory Management Test

Scenario: A vendor installing a new inventory management system and checking it’s functionality.

Objective: Check that stock levels reflect accurately in the system after changes — sales, restocking, returns. Do inventory levels update accurately after each event?

Test Steps:

• Check initial number of product units in the system (for example, 50 units).
• Sell a certain number (for example, 5).
• Complete the transaction.
• Check stock levels.

Expected Results:

Inventory system displays the accurate number of units before and after the test — 50 and 45, respectively, in this context.

Testing Sales Report Generation

Scenario: A vendor examining the efficacy of their sales report generation, based on real numbers around revenue and losses

Objective: Check that the system generates accurate sales reports in accordance with the number of transactions completed.

Test Steps:

• Complete three sales transactions in one day.
• Navigate to the “Reports” module in your app.
• Generate sales report for the day.

Expected Results:

The generated sales report should display all three transactions — the total amount and breakdown of each sale with details like amount, date, time and payment method.

Conclusion

Retail application testing ensures your app delivers a seamless user experience, secure transactions, and reliable performance. By addressing potential issues early, it boosts customer satisfaction, minimizes downtime, and helps your app stay competitive.

Source: This article was originally published at testgrid.io.