Inside the Data Engine: The Global Shift Toward Fully Automated Order Journeys

If you have ever had a shopping experience online where everything worked just right—from finding the product you wanted to placing an order without glitches—you have likely benefited from something you never saw—test automation.In e-commerce, where millions of transactions happen every day, companies are under pressure to keep their websites and applications running smoothly. People expect fast, reliable service. And with frequent updates, changing promotions, and flash sales, there is very little room for error. That’s why many companies are putting serious effort into automating how they test their platforms.Mohnish Srinivas Reddy Neelapu, an Automation Lead at a growing e-commerce company, has been at the center of this work. His role involves building systems that can automatically test how customers move through the shopping process, from browsing items to adding them to the cart, making a payment, and getting order confirmation. His approach goes beyond checking if buttons work or pages load. He has assisted in creating systems that pull in live data, like what’s in stock or where a customer is located, and use that to test how real people actually shop. This helps the company find and fix problems before customers run into them.One of the most important projects he led connected the company’s product catalog, payment tools, and delivery systems into one automated testing setup. Using tools like Selenium and Appium, along with cloud-based testing platforms, his team built a framework that could run hundreds of tests at the same time. “This reduced our end-to-end regression testing time by 40% and increased test coverage for critical journeys by 60%. We also saw a 30% drop in post-release issues, significantly improving customer satisfaction and reducing cart abandonment,” he shared.These improvements are especially helpful during busy times like flash sales, when the site sees a surge in traffic and everything needs to work perfectly. Thanks to better testing, his organisation can now launch new features faster and with more confidence. Neelapu also worked closely with developers and product teams to make sure testing was part of the development process from the start. This made it easier to catch issues early, rather than fixing them later. By tying testing into the company’s release pipeline, every update now gets automatically checked for problems before it reaches customers.Of course, achieving success in this area was not uncomplicated. One big challenge was ensuring that the testing tools could keep up with changes in the website and application. Neelapu mentioned, “To solve this, I introduced a modular architecture with dynamic data handling, enabling automated systems to evolve in response to shifting requirements.” His team designed a flexible system where test scripts could be reused and adjusted as needed. They also used data to decide which parts of the system were most at risk, so they could focus their efforts where it mattered most.Beyond this work, he has also added to the academic field through his research paper, “Enhancing Test Coverage through Data-Driven Automation Approaches” that introduces a smarter way to automate software testing using data and AI. By adjusting tests based on past issues and real-time changes, it helps find more bugs, cover more ground, and speed up testing, making it a better fit for fast-moving development teams.Looking ahead, he believes that automation will only become more important and says that smarter systems, ones that learn from user data and adjust tests on the fly, will help companies respond even faster to changes. He suggested, “One key insight from my work is that automation must evolve with business logic—static test cases quickly become obsolete. I recommend building modular, data-driven frameworks that can easily adapt to changing flows.”Lastly, in the market of contemporary times, customers don’t have patience for slow websites or failed checkouts. Organisations that want to stay ahead need to make sure their systems work well at all times. That means testing smarter, not just more.