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How LambdaTest Levels The Playing Field For Businesses Selling Online

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In a world where customers are moving online at an unprecedented pace, all businesses, from one-man bands to multinational conglomerates, need a website that works quickly and efficiently. But how do you know if your site is up to the job – that it runs smoothly on the myriad of different browsers, operating systems, apps and devices through which customers will access it?

Browser testing platform LambdaTest says its technology is the answer. The company is today announcing a $6m fundraising round led by Surge, Sequoia Capital’s scale-up program for start-ups in Southeast Asia and India. The money will be crucial as the company seeks to build the capacity it needs to respond to surging demand for its services.

“Post Covid-19, every business wants to be digital, but that has to be done well,” says Asad Khan, the company’s co-founder. “If your user experience is poor, customers will give up and you’ll lose the sale.”

The stakes are high, with customers expecting websites and mobile channels to deliver near instantaneous results. Research from Forrester Consulting suggests that 47% of consumers expect web pages to load in two seconds or less and that 40% will wait for no more than three seconds before giving up on a site. Shoppers’ patience is quickly exhausted – 79% of those who experience a dissatisfying visit say they are less likely to buy from a site again, while 64% warn they will buy from another online store.

The problem is that the proliferation of technology – and the global audience to which even small businesses now want to sell – makes it ever more challenging to be sure your web site functions well for all users at all times. Customers may be accessing your site from any one of thousands of different combinations of browser, operating system and device. Testing website and app performance for all those combinations is hard work, even for well-resourced companies; for smaller organisations it is practically impossible.

Enter LambdaTest. “Our goal is to eliminate the testing infrastructure that businesses otherwise need to have in-house,” explains Khan. “We want any business to be able to access performance statistics showing where their sites are working well – and where they’re not.”

To do that LambdaTest offers a cloud-based testing solution for which customers pay a subscription fee. Developers run their web pages through the testing platform, which provides an instant diagnosis of any problems that need addressing in the way the pages work across more than 2,000 browsers and operating system environments. The cost depends on the level of subscribers’ usage but the company offers a free version providing 60 minutes of access to testing each month, which will appeal to the smallest businesses as they seek to compete with much larger rivals.

Khan and co-founder Jay Singh launched the business in 2017, with demand growing quickly for its services from day one. But coming into the pandemic, LambdaTest found itself in the right place at the right time. Over the course of 2020, the company has seen growth of 8 to 10% a month in terms of sign-ups, customers, website visits, and revenues; it already has more than 350,000 users from 132 countries.

Importantly, those users come in all shapes and sizes. Alongside big-name clients including Xerox, Cisco, Deloitte and Coca Cola, LambdaTest’s customer base includes many smaller businesses and individuals. Its testing software effectively democratises e-commerce, giving even very small organisations the ability to compete against well-resourced international businesses.

Khan believes the company has much more to achieve, particularly as the next generation of devices, increasingly incorporating internet of things technologies, comes on-stream. “We want to be a one-stop shop for testing,” he says. “We can bring the whole testing ecosystem on to our platform.”

Delivering that ecosystem at scale will require a significant increase in the business’s cloud capacity – one reason for its fund-raising effort – but Khan believes now is the time to invest. “If we can deliver scale, reliability and performance, the future is very bright,” he says.

Certainly, businesses have never been more in need of such a service. In retail alone, e-commerce sales are up by 20% in many regions of the world this year. eMarketer expects global e-commerce sales by retailers to hit almost $4 trillion this year. However, businesses with a poorly-functioning web site risk missing out on their share of the pie.

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