When you have an e-commerce and ask yourself: “Do I need to prepare for Black Friday?”
If your goal is to increase sales, reduce costs and provide a positive shopping experience for your customers that will strengthen your brand image and increase customer loyalty, then yes, you have to be prepared for this moment, which can be decisive for your success!
This way, you ensure the stability and reliability of your system.
And how to prepare? Knowing the benefits of the Load and Stress test.
This test aims to validate the behavior of a normal or expected load of users and transactions on your system with simultaneous accesses on a typical day of use. Helping to verify the website’s ability to support a massive volume of accesses, preventing crashes during periods of high traffic, identifying bottlenecks and points of failure without compromising the website’s performance or availability.
This test aims to validate a load beyond the expected number of users and transactions in your system under extreme conditions on an atypical day, helping to check the limit by simulating extreme conditions, identifying how much the system can handle before failing, evaluating how it deals with overload situations, such as crashes, slowness or unexpected failures, thus ensuring that the system can recover adequately from failures and continue to function even under high stress.
We can use some tools for these load and stress tests. I will mention two, one paid and one free:
LoadRunner (MicroFocus) : Licensing is paid and has a simulation capacity for heavy loads and multiple simultaneous users.
Ideal for more complex scenarios such as e-commerce sites, which require a robust tool to test the entire performance infrastructure (servers, databases, networks, etc.). Simulating the real user experience.
Apache JMeter: licensing is open source and most popular for performing load and performance tests, usable for testing the functioning of web applications and servers.
It can be configured to simulate the load of active users and also stress tests through which you can find out the failure point of the system.
Suitable for e-commerce as it is a highly flexible solution and can be customized on an open source system.
According to an article by Ecommerce Brasil in 2023, on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, e-commerces lose R$98.3 million in revenue due to slowness and instability issues. The benefits of performing load and stress tests before Black Friday are absolutely essential for those who want to ensure that their e-commerce is prepared for a big movement!