UK economy cannot afford downtime in run up to busiest time of the year for ecommerce shopping

BRITISH tech bosses are warning of potential systems crash as we approach Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the extra demand running up to the Christmas trading period as ecommerce systems will be pushed to breaking point, with an unprecedented surge in demand from shoppers and issues in the supply chain and delivery fulfilment.

Add in a massive shortage of trained quality engineers that are needed to build quality into e-commerce systems and a perfect storm has been created. With just 2 months until Christmas, retailers face an unprecedented demand on the supply of products and the delivery of goods to customers, but systems in place are not able to support the demand as several British retailers have reported systems issues and websites crashing.

Quality engineering and software testing plays a critical role in ecommerce retailing as we rely on more online purchases. Credersi and ROQ, (ROQ is based in Chorley and London) which are at the forefront of tech training and quality engineering; are addressing the shortage of quality engineers through a uniquely designed fast-track training course. They are also increasing their efforts to encourage more ethnic diversity in tech, along with more women, ex forces, apprentices, return to work and career changers.

Stephen Johnson, Founder and CEO of ROQ, 1 of the leading figures and experts in the industry said:- "As we approach the busiest time of the year with Christmas just weeks away, retailers are faced with an unprecedented set of demands from consumers. Demand is outstripping supply and goods are taking longer to manufacture and deliver. Much of this due in part to the factors of Brexit, the Pandemic, and the horrific war in Ukraine. All of us have come up against website outages or instances of technology not working as it should, and these issues also perfectly demonstrate the vulnerability of systems if they do not have quality built into them and are not regularly tested. No company is too big to fail and the impact on any business can be devastating both financially and in losing customer trust and goodwill."

A year ago the cloud computing service 'Fastly' took down thousands of websites in multiple countries, costing numerous businesses billions in lost revenue. Retailers such as Amazon and eBay also found their websites had disappeared for an hour. These 2 companies alone boast a combined £25 billion in annual sales in the UK, meaning a 1 hour outage would have cost £3 million between them over that period. Other ecommerce sites such as PayPal were also hit and based on their reported transactions of $963 billion, the 1-hour outage would have put a stop to $106 million of transactions.

Johnson continued:- "It is absolutely vital that any high street or online retailer with an ecommerce presence ensures that their quality engineering and software testing is put front and centre of their operations. There simply aren't enough Quality Engineers to keep up with the demand by British companies and very soon this will reach breaking point. Together with Credersi, we are working to address that issue and have created a:- 'best in class' curriculum in Quality Engineering, taking candidates on a 12 week course followed by client side experience to final certification through our Quality Engineering Academy. Most importantly, the ROQ curriculum will ensure all Academy Consultants are:- 'work ready' to fill those key roles immediately."

The training course; which was originally aimed at graduates and has been newly expanded for 2023 to also provide apprenticeships to attract a wider talent pool of ex-forces, ex-services and 'return to work' candidates; enables Academy Consultants to become fully qualified Quality Engineers. Not only will the engineers gain an ISTQB foundation level qualification in software testing, but they will also benefit from real world skills, using contemporary testing tools and techniques. All of the course topics are supported with real-life challenges and projects to ensure scenario planning.