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Case Study:
How carsales Stays On Top of Testing The Newest Devices

carsales.com.au leads the online automotive classifieds business in Australia as the top resource for consumers searching a new or used car. From hybrids and pick-up trucks to even motorcycles and speedboats, carsales and its subsidiaries connect thousands of prospects with their ideal vehicle every year.

However, with such a large dependency on the stability, functionality, and performance of its online presence, Quality Assurance Manager Scott Clements had come to realize that carsales had not fully been optimizing its web application for every user. To fix the gaps, it began looking for a platform that would aid carsales in:

  • Reducing cost of ownership and maintenance of mobile devices
  • Improving speed of testing and time to market for its main application
  • Reducing the amount of cross browser bugs it was seeing.




 

carsales's Challenges

With thousands of site visitors conducting millions of searches for their dream car, truck, or boat each month, carsales depends on a complex, high-performing online experience to drive record growth for the company.

As carsales began to accelerate that growth and take on more customers, they found they had hundreds of different types of buyers visiting on different sized desktop screens and mobile browsers.

Previously, the carsales QA team had been using an in-house device lab for mobile testing. This lab was a capital expense and also took time to properly maintain and update devices.

Since carsales.com.au is all digital and lacks a brick and mortar storefront for its customers, it relies on its web application to be fully-functioning on any device in order for its visitors to be able to effortlessly find a vehicle that fit their needs and tastes.

Unfortunately, it was becoming impossible to test on a selection of browsers large enough to get a true understanding of the user experience it was providing, and do it quickly.

Scott Clements
Scott Clements
Head of QA

carsales.com Ltd (ASX: CAR) is the largest online automotive, motorcycle and marine classifieds business in Australia. There vision is to provide a smooth car buying and selling journey for all Australians.

Location:
Australia

Sector:
eCommerce

Products Used:

Why Us?

  • Wide selection of desktop & mobile browsers
  • Ability for entire team to Live Test

How We Helped

carsales was in need of a solution that would allow it to speed up its testing and expand the number of devices it could test on, without raising infrastructure costs.

Upon looking at different cloud testing services, Clements and his team conducted thorough research of their options. They wanted to make sure that the platform they chose was a good value with a high number of physical device offerings that included the latest browser, device and operating system releases.

Clements and team felt very comfortable early on with CrossBrowserTesting as it had everything they needed for manual, automated, and visual testing in one platform. Furthermore, CrossBrowserTesting has the largest selection of desktop and mobile browsers, meaning the team would be able to hunt and reduce bugs on any device that customers were using.

Throughout the decision-making process, CrossBrowserTesting was always on-hand to answer questions and work to provide the perfect solution for carsales’ needs, including manual and automated testing.

The simple and straightforward onboarding process further solidified the choice for carsales -- any difficulties that arose were promptly met and solved by the CrossBrowserTesting support team.

ROI and Future Plans in Automation

Though carsales had a relatively basic requirement to fulfill, it discovered that there was added value to be gained by outsourcing cross-browser testing efforts to the cloud.

While the carsales QA team originally sought a tool primarily for Live Testing, it quickly became adept at Screenshot capturing and Selenium scripting with Javascript. By leveraging functionalities beyond manual testing to include visual testing and automation, it was able to accelerate and improve everyday testing workflows.

Using these features in CrossBrowserTesting, the QA team was catching more bugs on more browsers and devices before software reached customers. Clements also noted that using CrossBrowserTesting’s cloud service meant carsales was spending less money and time on purchasing devices, and more resources spent on building a better application for the customer base.

This meant that carsales could be confident that its web application would be tested for a more significant number of prospects and delivered with a faster time to market and less bugs, while also cutting costs.

What started as an annoying testing problem and tedious device lab maintenance, ended with carsales utilizing CrossBrowserTesting to make a noticeable impact in the speed and coverage of its internal testing as well as quality of its services for any and every customer.