Assessing the E-commerce websites for performance using automated testing tools

Abstract

The number of users accessing an ecommerce website is generally high. The performance of websites to cater to the increased number of concurrent users is inevitable to manage the growing online business needs. The architecture of the company’s website should be robust enough to manage the expected traffic on heavy load. The inability to support the growing customer needs would return frustration that leads to heavy business loss. Therefore, it is mandate for e-commerce websites to perform load testing to assess the robustness of their architecture to support scalability. This study features the assessment of e-commerce websites for its performance based on throughput, availability and response time. The study utilizes Apache JMeter to perform load testing on selected five ecommerce websites in Thailand by emulating customer behaviors at heavy load levels. The paper proposes a methodology that could help future testing practitioners and researchers to perform load testing efficiently.