Peak-season readiness: what to ask a performance testing vendor
- What is the largest retail load you tested, and in what unit?Users, requests per second and orders per hour are different units and cannot be converted without assumptions.
- Which published case shows that figure?A load figure without a case or a client statement is a claim this site cannot check.
- How will you model our peak from our own data?Last season's traffic, conversion and basket mix should drive the test profile, not a default script.
- Which systems are inside the test and which are stubbed?Payments, search, inventory and the OMS (order management system: software that routes, splits and tracks customer orders across stores, warehouses and carriers.) often fail first; a test that stubs them measures less.
- How many weeks do you need before our code freeze?Environment build, scripting, baseline runs and retests each take time that the plan should show.
- What do you deliver after each run?Response times by percentile, error rates and the bottleneck found give the team something to fix.
- Who watches production on the peak days?Monitoring and a named contact during the event are part of readiness, not an extra.
Download this checklist
The checklist file holds the 7 steps above, one per row, with a column for your notes on each vendor.
peak-season-readiness-what-to-ask-a-performance-testing-vendor-checklist.csvCSV1 KBCC BY 4.0What the data on this site shows
- QA vendors for ecommerce and D2C brands: 6 vendors meet the facet evidence rule.
Questions
What is peak load testing?
Peak load testing sends the traffic a site expects on its busiest day to a test environment and measures response times and errors. For a retailer that is Black Friday, a holiday sale or a product drop. A useful test is modelled on last season's real traffic and order mix and includes payments, search and inventory, not only the home page.
Published by the editor of retailqavendors.com. Last reviewed .