Retail software testing
Retail has a deadline nobody in the business controls. Peak arrives on a date set by the calendar, the code freeze starts weeks before it, and everything that is going to be tested has to be tested before then. The testing plan runs backwards from a fixed point, which is unusual and changes how the work is sequenced.
We are an independent testing company. An embedded team can be working on your estate in about two weeks, and those first two weeks are free if you are not happy with what we deliver.
Checkout, which is the only page with a cost per minute
Every other defect is expensive in a way you argue about afterwards. A broken checkout has a measurable cost while it is broken.
It is also the most variable page you own. Card, wallet, buy now pay later, gift card, voucher, store credit and split tender across two of them. Guest against account. Address validation and the addresses it rejects that are real. Delivery slot and its expiry. Tax and duty for a cross-border order. A payment that is authorised and then fails to capture.
The test that is almost always missing is the partial failure: the payment succeeded, the order did not get created, and the customer has a charge and no confirmation email. That path exists in every implementation and is exercised in almost none of them.
Promotions, which is where retail bugs actually live
Stacking rules, exclusions, thresholds, category overlaps, a voucher that combines with itself, a percentage discount applied after a fixed one instead of before, and the free delivery threshold calculated on the pre-discount total.
Promotion engines are combinatorial and the combinations change weekly, so scripted regression falls behind by design. The approach that holds is a generated matrix over the live promotion set, run automatically whenever the promotion configuration changes, asserting the rules rather than the individual outcomes.
The order pipeline after the order
Inventory reservation and timeout, oversell and what happens when it occurs, click and collect, ship from store, split shipment across three fulfilment points, and the partial refund of an order that was split.
The refund and returns path carries the same money as the order path and gets tested roughly a tenth as often. Returning one item from a split-shipment order that used a voucher, a gift card and a card is a sentence that describes a real customer and an untested code path.
Omnichannel adds the seams: an online order returned in store, loyalty points earned on one channel and spent on another, and the customer who exists twice because they used a different email at the till.
Stores, and the offline case
Point of sale is software with a queue of people standing in front of it. The defect that matters most is not a functional one, it is what the till does when the connection drops. Offline mode, queued transactions, the reconciliation when it comes back, and duplicate postings from transactions that went through twice.
It is almost never in a test plan, and it is the one that becomes a business continuity incident.
Scale, peak and the things that degrade
A catalogue of tens of thousands of pages means defects are statistical rather than individual. You sample, and then you report which URLs were affected rather than a percentage on its own. We hold the URL list behind every aggregate figure we give you, because the first question anyone sensible asks about "31 percent of sampled product pages" is which 31 percent, and re-sampling to answer it wastes a day.
For peak, the number is p95 at load rather than an average in a quiet window, and the usual cause of checkout degradation is not your application at all but third party tags loading in front of it. See performance testing and load and performance testing.
Across the whole estate: web testing, mobile app testing and localisation testing for currency, tax display, address formats and right to left layouts.
Accessibility, which became a deadline
The European Accessibility Act has applied to ecommerce since 28 June 2025, which moved accessibility out of the backlog and into the same category as tax and payments. Assessments are made against WCAG AA, reached through the harmonised standard EN 301 549.
A retail site is also unusually exposed here, because the journey is long and a single inaccessible step in checkout blocks the whole transaction rather than degrading it. We audit against the real journey rather than page by page, using Auditi, our own auditing tool, which is included in the engagement. See WCAG compliance audits.
When we are the wrong choice
We would rather say this on the page than on the third call.
If you want to start three weeks before Black Friday, say no to us. We will find things nobody has time to fix, and knowing about a defect you cannot fix before peak is worse than the alternative for everyone involved. Useful pre-peak testing starts in the summer. Come to us in January instead and we will be worth it.
We do not do merchandising, conversion rate optimisation, creative or UX design. We test what you built. We will tell you where a journey fails, not what it should sell.
Store hardware certification is not us. Scanners, receipt printers, cash drawers and payment terminal accreditation. We test your software against them where you have a lab; we do not certify the device.
If production is your only environment, we are limited to read-only testing and will say what that does and does not cover rather than pretending otherwise.
How we start, and what it costs
Two weeks, no contract. We embed, learn the estate, write tests and file real bugs against your actual software. If you are not happy with what we deliver in those two weeks, you do not pay for them. You decide whether to carry on, and we invoice from week three.
After that, $25 to $45 an hour depending on seniority, commitment length and the mix of manual, automation and specialist work. Longer commitments move down that range.
Included at no licence cost: BugBoard for test management, Flows for automation that heals its own selectors when a template changes, Auditi for GDPR, WCAG and FDA auditing, BetterFlow so you can see where the hours went, and our AI Security Toolkit.
Our engineers are in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, on GMT+2 and GMT+3 in summer, covering the European trading day and the start of the US East Coast one.
Talk to us
Tell us what you sell, where peak falls for you, and what broke last time. We will tell you what is worth doing before the freeze and what should wait until after it.