I sometime test the checkout by temporarily changing the Stripe checkout to test mode and putting through a purchase.
It works, but being a manual process it depends upon my doing it – and when WordPress is updated or WooCommerce is updated, or some plugin or other that might interfere with another plugin is updated, do I test? No, I do not. Not every time. And that’s a problem.
Robot Ninja tests your checkout regularly to make sure everything is working.
As it says in its blurb;
Don’t wait days or weeks to hear from customers that your checkout isn’t working or waste the time manually checking your store. Schedule tests to run daily or weekly to save you time.
Select real products from your site to use in your tests. No more testing with dummy or $0 products or by having to create test coupons. And you are free to use actual products.
It visits the site and test products as a guest customer and also as a logged in user; it tries selecting all variation options if they exist; it adds the product to the cart; and it purchases the product using an available payment gateway (with priority on using Stripe).
Our store is connected to a fulfilment house that sends out the goods, and our system notifies the fulfilment house automatically when a customer orders a product.
When I test the checkout manually I temporarily disable the notification that is sent automatically to our fulfilment house when a customer purchases a product.
Then I re-enable notifications after I have completed the manual test.
So it’s a problem for us if the service is jumping around and testing different products, because our fulfilment house is going to be getting a lot of dummy notifications and think they are real orders.
Provided I can nominate the product that RobotNinja tests, I can set up a dummy product to be tested, and exclude it from the notifications that go to the fulfilment house.
But I have never thought to set up a dummy product to test, and exclude that from the notifications.
I would also hide the dummy product from the catalogue.
Hidden products are not visible to customers’ searches and do not appear in the shop page. So unless a ‘real’ customer knows the URL of the product, they will not find it.
Looking through the documentation I see that one can nominate a product or products to be tested.
Next thing: What happens with the payments that go through Stripe. What does Stripe think about these transactions? How does it work? I asked Support and this is the reply:
“If Stripe is used in Live mode they are treated like a normal transaction. Upon completion of an order we process a refund via the WooCommerce API and delete the order.
We also support Stripe in test mode using one of its fake card numbers they provide. You also have the option to disable “placing an order”. We complete the checkout up to the point of clicking the place order button but stop there.
We also support $0 products.
Basically there are a few different options depending on backend systems/costs/etc.
Now I need to think it through to make sure there isn’t a snag that I haven’t thought of yet. I’ll update this post as and when I have done that.