3 Reasons I Use Dummy Data for My E-Commerce Store
Published July 3, 2024.
E-commerce store owners are under increasing pressure to deliver phenomenal, personalized, and convenient experiences to their consumers. As customer expectations continue to grow, it's crucial to ensure your store is as streamlined and efficient as possible.
Unfortunately, as I've discovered myself, it can be difficult to determine at a glance whether a store will work exactly as intended. For me, using dummy data is an effective way to test store functionality quickly and painlessly.
Dummy data is simply randomly generated data you can add to your store to check for performance, design, or experience issues.
Below, I'll list some reasons why every business should use dummy data.
» Never created dummy data before? Here's how
1. Test For Issues
Any issue, from a page not loading properly to missing tracking data, can cause you to lose valuable customers. Dummy data allows you to test all the processes in your Shopify development store before you launch it. I've built a clothing store and used dummy data to test whether my customers could easily select the right size and colors when adding products to their carts. I also made sure that information was correctly sent to me on the back end.
2. Improve Customer Experience
The best online stores make purchasing products as simple and straightforward as possible for customers. However, it's difficult to know what your customers experience without a little testing. So, I used dummy data to step into the shoes of my customers. I went through the entire purchasing process: making sure it's easy to search for products, adding them to a cart, and even tracking out-of-stock items. I ended by checking whether the checkout process was too long (leading to cart abandonment).
3. Identify Redundancies
Dummy data is also a great opportunity to track redundancies in your code that might be slowing down your website or affecting its performance. For example, I found one piece of my code was causing pictures to load too slowly when customers were trying to enlarge them, so I adjusted it.
» Explore additional benefits of dummy data for Shopify
How I Easily Generate Sample Data With Egnition's App
Generate an Immersive Trial to Fully Test Your Dev Store
Install for FreeFree plan
-
Yes
Packages
-
Two plans
Pricing
-
Once-off fee ($0.99)
Customer service
-
Excellent
So, after using dummy data for a while now, I wish I had relied on it more heavily when building websites in the past. Before knowing better, I thought it was going to be extremely complicated and take time.
But thankfully, the Simple Sample Data app from Egnition solves all of this. I can rapidly create sample product data for my development store by choosing from a range of different themes. "Clothing and brand products" naturally worked best for my apparel store. All I needed to do was click a button. Plus, I could also delete all of the dummy data when it was time to launch my official store.
» Learn more about this handy app in the following Simple Sample Data review
