The State Of App Testing 2020: New Benchmarks For Commerce & Retail Apps

Tim Ryan , Tim Ryan serves as the Director of Marketing for Testlio and spends his time between Austin, TX and New Orleans, LA.

September 28th, 2020

September 28, 2020. Austin, TX. Testlio, the originator of Networked Testing, today revealed new testing benchmarks for commerce and retail app developers. 

State of App Testing 2020: Commerce & Retail leverages anonymized test records from Testlio clients in the commerce and retail industry, including eCommerce, brick-and-mortar retail, residential real estate, quick service restaurants, and online marketplaces. The report also incorporates data from AppAnnie benchmarking averages for the 30 top-rated U.S. Commerce & Retail apps in early September 2020.

The report unpacks app development and testing processes used by leading global commerce and retail brands and highlights important metrics.

Key findings include: 

• Release Cadence. The top commerce and retail apps release 2-3 times per month across iOS and Android. Notably, release frequency correlates with higher iOS app ratings. Specifically, the top 30 shopping apps with three or more updates per month average a 0.3 point higher rating on the App Store (4.8 vs. 4.5).
• Tester Dynamics. Testlio’s Commerce & Retail clients generally use a range of 10-20 testers per major run, with an average tester team size of 24. Testers work collectively and remotely across multiple cities, states, and countries—by design (read the report to learn more).  
• Device Coverage. Highly rated Commerce & Retail apps test across multiple devices and OS combinations to ensure quality user experiences. For example, a Testlio eCommerce client that tests 41 unique device/OS combinations per run ties with three other top-30 shopping apps for the highest rating (4.9). 

In addition, the report uncovers additional perspectives and best practices on acceptance criteria, time zone alignments, device considerations, and more. The report is available for free download here.  

Testlio is honored to work with leading commerce and retail app providers. We’ve appreciated the opportunity to learn with them. Today, we’re excited to share anonymized and aggregated retail app testing data and best practices. Our hope is that our findings help retailers everywhere test and release great software—ensuring exceptional user experiences.

Steve Semelsberger, CEO, Testlio