E-commerce E2E Test Suite — Playwright + Python

This repo shows how I set up production-grade UI automation for a web shop: 12 end-to-end tests covering registration, login, search, cart and checkout, running headless in CI on every push — with an HTML report and failure screenshots/traces attached to every run.

Target application: automationexercise.com — a full e-commerce site (catalog, accounts, cart, payments) built as an automation target.

What's covered

Suite	Tests	Highlights
test_smoke.py	1	App is up, home page renders
test_auth.py	4	Signup, login, wrong password and taken email negative paths
test_search.py	2	Matching results + empty-result negative path
test_cart.py	3	Add to cart, quantity × price totals, remove
test_checkout.py	2	Guest checkout gate + full purchase flow: registration → product → cart → checkout → payment → order confirmation

The showcase test is test_full_purchase_flow — the complete money path a real client pays to keep green.

Stack

Playwright (Chromium · Firefox · WebKit) · pytest · Page Object Model · Faker · pytest-html · pytest-xdist · GitHub Actions

Run it locally

pip install -r requirements.txt
playwright install
pytest --html=report.html --self-contained-html

# parallel (data isolation supports it)
pytest -n 4

# a different engine
pytest --browser firefox

Design decisions

• Page Object Model — selectors and page flows live in pages/, tests read as business scenarios.
• Every test owns its data — accounts are generated with Faker and created/removed through the site's REST API in fixtures (conftest.py), so tests are independent and order-agnostic.
• Resilient selectors — get_by_role / data-qa attributes, no brittle XPath. Where the markup fights ARIA (e.g. an <a class="check_out"> with no href, which therefore has no link role), a stable CSS class beats matching on display text.
• Typed test data — user/payment factories return TypedDicts (utils/data_generator.py), so editors and pyright catch a missing or misspelled field before it reaches the form.
• No time.sleep() — Playwright auto-waiting and web-first expect assertions only.
• Ad traffic is blocked at network level — the target site serves ad iframes that can cover buttons and steal clicks; a route filter in conftest.py keeps runs deterministic.
• Cross-browser in CI — the GitHub Actions matrix runs the full suite on Chromium, Firefox and WebKit on every push (.github/workflows/tests.yml).
• Failure diagnostics — screenshots on failure locally; in CI also Playwright traces, uploaded with the HTML report as a per-browser workflow artifact.

Field notes from automating this target

Real-world issues found and handled while building the suite:

• Third-party ad scripts intermittently overlay call-to-action buttons and intercept clicks — the kind of flakiness source you have to engineer around in production suites (solved here with network-level request blocking rather than retries or sleeps).
• The shared demo site sheds load with 503 "queue full" pages for minutes at a time. Handled on two levels: page navigation retries on 5xx (pages/base_page.py), and test-level reruns in CI only — locally failures stay loud. Failure screenshots made the diagnosis trivial: the "failing test" screenshot was just the 503 page.
• The signup form and the account API use different field names for the same data (first_name vs firstname), which the data factory has to map explicitly.
• Search relevance finding: a strict assertion ("every result name contains the query") failed honestly and exposed real behaviour — searching for dress also returns "Sleeves Top and Short - Blue & Pink". The engine matches fields that are not shown on the result card (category/description), so users can't tell why an item matched. On a client project this goes straight into the bug tracker as a UX/relevance issue; this site is a training target without a public tracker, so it's documented here.

What I'd add next

• Visual regression checks for key pages.
• An API test layer reusing the same data factories.
• Adopt an open-source target (e.g. RealWorld/Conduit) to file real bug reports upstream.