Why prototype testing matter to e-commerce platforms?

The e-commerce sector is constantly growing. Now, most consumers prefer buying online instead of going to shops. There are plenty of reasons behind this trend, including lack of time for maintaining work-life balance, the availability of the product, and the cost of conveyance to go from home to shop and vice versa.

Since most customers prefer buying online, it’s essential for e-commerce portals to have a standout presence among their competitors. 

According to a market research report, the global rapid prototyping market size is 3125 million USD in 2024. It is likely to cross 11596 million USD by 2031 at a CAGR of approximately 21% per year from 2024 through 2031. In such a situation, you should not only create a working business website, but you may also need to focus on UX (User Experience) heavily. You can improve your site’s speed, functionalities, features, and visibility by necessary prototype testing. 

In this article, we’ll discuss the meaning and importance of prototype testing for e-commerce websites and how it can help business owners!

Prototype Testing: Meaning and Explanation

Prototyping testing means creating the basic version of your e-commerce portal and letting users work on it and perform simple activities like scrolling through the site, checking product descriptions, adding products to carts, and experiencing the checkout process.

Now, after the prototype testing, users need to submit valuable feedback to the business owner or site administrator, informing them about their site experience. It plays a crucial role in the success of an e-commerce site. Based on the feedback, the administrator can further improve the site, enhancing the site’s speed, functions, and user experience.

In technical jargon, the process of prototype testing can be developing interactive mockups or simple wireframes depending on the company’s needs and IT policies.

After briefly discussing the meaning of prototype testing for an e-commerce portal, you’d be interested in knowing its importance and benefits.

Let’s take a look!

Benefits of Prototyping for E-commerce Portals 

Optimize Your Development Expenses: When you successfully build the prototype of your e-commerce site, it can help you save a lot of money in fixing technical gnaws at the developing stage itself. Identifying technical issues and rectifying them during the development stage can help you avoid unnecessary problems after the launch of the site, which could lead to even higher expenses.

Better Customer Satisfaction: Your customers, who get familiar with the site during the prototype testing stage, are likely to choose your site again for buying goods next time, too. It helps customers understand your site better, knowing your products, besides improving their loyalty towards the site.

Access to More People: The end goal of all business websites is to reach out to the maximum number of customers within a geographical boundary. Through prototype evaluation, you can easily identify whether your site reaches out to your target audience across the target market or not. 

If you feel that your site is not accessible across the target market, you may consider making it more accessible by enhancing its page loading speed, mobile friendliness, and also checking if the site is blocked in certain regions and how you can get it unblocked.

Evaluating Features and Functions: Even if your site offers multiple features and functionalities, it might be possible that certain functions are not activated or don’t work smoothly. 

In such a case, you should get your website redesigned and thoroughly check each function as per the advice of your development team during the prototyping stage. 

Your developers may have to go through multiple usability tests to assess the performance of your site.

Iterate and Enhance UX: If you feel there is any scope for improving the UX (user experience) of the site, you should get it done. Conduct necessary tests, fixes, and reviews as many times as possible to ensure that your e-commerce portal is up to industry standards and rises above the expectations of your target audience.

In conclusion

Users’ attention spans are dropping day by day. It’s well known that if a site doesn’t appear on top of the search engine, looks good, has slow page loading speed, and is not user-friendly, customers will immediately move to your competitor.

So, protype testing allows you to enhance the quality of your ecommerce portal, ensuring better user experience and generating more leads from the target audience.