Test your store using these best practices

Who should test

The more people testing, the more issues you’ll catch before customers do:

• You, your employees, and your coworkers

• Your client or store owner, and their team

• People unfamiliar with the system — they’ll do things you didn’t expect

• Anyone else willing to click through a test order

What to test

Add-to-cart links and forms (on every page that uses them)

• Confirm input is validated — check what happens if a customer enters a quote, apostrophe, line break, or other special character into a field, especially if those links or forms are generated by a CMS

Cart and checkout templates

• All the browsers your customers are likely to use

• Orders with a separate shipping address

• Orders from different countries, and from different regions within your own country

Receipt template

• This one gets skipped more than any other — don’t forget it

Receipt emails

• Confirm receipts actually arrive at the expected inbox

• If you have DMARC configured for your store’s email domain, set Foxy’s email DNS option so receipts aren’t quarantined or blocked

Shipping

• Confirm every shipping method you offer is actually available in all the states or provinces you sell to (some express options aren’t available everywhere)

• Confirm the rates returned are accurate

• Confirm handling fees are applied correctly

Taxes

• Consult a tax professional for your state or country before relying on Foxy’s tax calculations

Coupons and gift cards

• Remove any test coupons or gift cards before launch — a customer could guess a leftover code and apply a large discount

Payment gateway

• Test with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and any other card types you accept (Maestro, debit, Diners Club, etc.)

• Run a real transaction with your own card, then void it so you aren’t charged

• Review your gateway’s fraud controls and default settings

• If necessary, turn off your gateway’s CSC (CVV2/CSC2/CID) requirement — CSCs can’t be stored, so they aren’t sent for subscription charges or saved cards

Merchant account

• Run a few live transactions to confirm funds move from your gateway to your merchant account without issues

• Check for default settings or fraud controls on the merchant account side

• Confirm you know how to refund a transaction

Downloadable products (if applicable)

• Confirm files uncompress correctly on Windows, Mac, and Linux

• Confirm files are usable and not corrupted

Subscriptions

• Run a real subscription on your live gateway with your own card, set to a 1-day cycle so you don’t have to wait for it to renew

• Turn off any CSC requirement on your gateway — CSCs aren’t sent on subscription renewals (other than the first charge, unless it’s set for a future date)

• Watch your error log in the Foxy admin while you test

Third-party, webhook, and API integrations

• Confirm integrations are working and receiving the data you expect

• If you’re using webhooks, confirm you’re only acting on the events you intend to, and that you’re handling (or intentionally ignoring) any pending statuses your gateway sends

• Test integrations more than you think you need to

Fulfillment and business processes

• Decide what happens when an order comes in: who’s notified, and what’s the backup if they’re on vacation or their computer is down? A distribution list is more reliable than a single person’s inbox

• Map out the path from order to shipment to follow-up, with clear ownership at each step

• Decide who handles problem orders, and who has authority to void a transaction

• Keep track of who has access to the gateway, merchant account, bank account, Foxy admin, and any third-party services — and keep those credentials secure

• Decide what verification happens on an order before it ships, and what fraud checks you run on your end

Notes

• This list isn’t exhaustive — add to it as you find gaps specific to your store.