Note: Occasionally a client may rewrite work or change it enough that I no longer feel it accurately represents the work that I did. In those cases, I keep my version here, so that you can see what my work looks like, and so that I don’t misrepresent work as mine that wasn’t. This piece was accepted and paid for by Testlio.com and edited heavily.
Once a customer is convinced to purchase, the last obstacle in the way is the payment gateway. Because online transactions already come fraught with resistance, it’s critical that customers experience a frictionless payment experience. Even minor glitches can cause cart abandonment and reduce sales volume. Meanwhile, companies rely on secure transactions, with order data always available and payments never stopped mid-transaction.
So, payment testing is the most critical step in the QA process. Where other aspects of a system may enjoy the leeway to go live while small problems are ironed out, payment gateways cannot afford anything less than perfect reliability. This is why payment testing needs to be taken seriously.
What is Payment Testing?
Payment testing is simply the thorough testing of every aspect of order transactions, from start to payment and shipping info to forwarding payment data to merchant accounts to transferring funds to finalizing payment and shipping orders.
Payments can fail at any point along this chain, both due to user error and system error. If a customer enters the wrong expiration date, for example, a payment will fail. By the same token, if an API call fails to connect to a financial institution or transaction information is lost between page loads, these things can delay or stop payments.
Failure at any point in the chain can cause frustration at best and more major issues at worst. If a user can’t remember their 3-digit security code, they may try once or twice and then give up entirely on the sale. If an error comes back that the user can’t understand (e.g. a thrown exception), they’re liable to lose trust. If an order is completed but payment information can’t validate, companies could find themselves packaging orders without being paid. These are just a few of the potential impacts to companies and users if payment gateways aren’t thoroughly tested.
Payment Gateway Testing Examples
Every piece of a payment system needs vetting, starting with a few validations:
- Check card numbers: Make sure CC numbers can be verified. Before using live cards, test numbers should be used to verify that validity checks work.
- Check exchange rates and currency: Make sure foreign purchasers succeed and are charged the right amount. This means systems should be up to date on exchange rates, and on a related note, shipping rates to these locales.
- Check for timeouts: Make sure connections between servers don’t time out and data is transferred reliably. Redundancy should be built in, and users should be informed of timeouts.
- Confirm successful payment confirmation: Make sure APIs return proper payment confirmation, and these data are validated.
- Payment failures and following steps: Proper steps should be taken in case of a failure, including communication with users and backing orders out of fulfillment systems.
Types of Payment Gateway Testing
Testing payment gateways utilize different software tests against a set of predetermined parameters to check performance and where there’s a need to build out or improve capabilities. Testing must mimic each payment process step to verify that connections and paths for communications are working. Any bug in the workflow can immediately end the transaction – and the sale.
Examples of critical payment testing phases include:
- Functional: Confirms that the payment gateway is properly working with the merchant’s system and processing transactions correctly.
- Integration: Checks that each new service, payment, or feature added is compatible with the
- existing app.
- Performance: Verifies the app is performing equally across all devices and O/S combinations,
- tests for the maximum number of simultaneous transactions from multiple users.
- Usability: Tests the experience of using the payment gateway to ensure it is well-designed as
- well as fully functioning.
- Location: Uses region-based testing examples to verify that the payment gateway can
- handle customer locations and calculate the proper specifications (sales taxes,
- global shipping fees, import tax).
- Localization: international customers can make payments in their local currency.
- Security: Checks security of PII and financial information. All bank accounts and credit card numbers must be securely transmitted using strong encryption across the transaction.
- Compatibility: Ensures that the payment gateway can manage transactions across different
- platforms.
Conclusion
Don’t let an inefficient payment experience damage your reputation and cost you sales. Testlio can help you deliver seamless and accurate payment experiences to all users, in any location on any device. Contact us today to request your free demo.