As the balance between offline and online sales is tipping towards the online side of the scale, the importance of a well-functioning webshop is constantly increasing. You want to attract and serve as many customers as possible by improving and optimising your webshop, so that it looks good and works well no matter how your customers are reaching it.

We’re experiencing technical difficulties, please spend your money elsewhere

Ideally, you’re already aware of the fact that your different customers use different operating systems, with different web browsers, and even different versions of the browser. Maybe you’ve already noticed that the loading times of your webshop are quick on a desktop computer but frustratingly slow on mobile devices. Or that certain features of your webshop work perfectly fine in one browser but abysmally in another. It could even be so specific that your customers aren’t receiving the user experience you intended because they’ve been postponing the update to the latest version of their browser – after all, that means they might have to restart their browser and we all know what a hassle that is…The fact of the matter here is that if you’re not paying attention to issues like these you’re most likely missing out on conversions or sales. If customers are going through the steps of your checkout process only to realize that the payment gateway isn’t working, it’s very unlikely that they will try again in a different browser – if they even have an alternate browser installed.

You can’t have everything you want

Obviously you can’t buy all the devices with different operating systems, different browsers, and different browser versions, just so you can test your webshop extensively – if you’re doing this the negative numbers in your profit and loss statement aren’t due to missed sales… What you can do is use web tools, like analytics, to see which combinations of operating systems and browsers, or browser versions that your customers are using most commonly. With this information you might choose to focus on the top 80-90% of browsers and browser versions. Even then, this means you would cover a large variety of combinations – usually Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge (and Internet Explorer) in their respective most current versions and previous versions. Additionally, you can’t have several versions of the same browser installed on the same machine so you would need one instance of each device for each version of that particular browser, if you want to test on real machines.Chrome for AndroidChrome 68.0Safari iPhoneChrome 67.0Firefox 61.0UC Browser 12.8Internet Explorer 11.0Safari iPadSamsung Internet 7.2Safari 11.1Edge 17Global market share held by the leading web browser versions as of August 2018 @ Statista

You can have everything you want

Now, you’re quite tech-savvy – you did set up your own webshop after all, so you’ve heard of the concept of virtual machines and simulating real devices when you don’t have the appropriate physical system at hand. Setting up and maintaining all these different virtual machines, however, is time-consuming, sometimes complicated and furthermore, too costly for your development budget. What you’re looking for is somewhere you can test on all the combinations of browsers, browser versions, and operating systems that you need to, in order to verify that your webshop actually works as you’ve intended. In our Device Cloud you get access to these combinations and you can conduct manual or automated testing, depending on what you need. An example of the diversity of devices that can be tested, each coloured rectangle represents a different model of smartphone.Moreover, you can start testing during development, so you discover issues and address them early. You’ll continually improve your webshop, even after going live, and make sure you convert potential customers to actual customers. With access to the systems you need when you need them, you’ll save time and money by not having to maintain a virtual environment, leading to positive outcomes for you and your team – and hopefully for your profit and loss statement.

Keep your feet on the ground and your devices in the cloud

The Device Cloud give