5 E-Commerce Payment Gateway Testing Use Cases

Without payment gateway testing, you risk cart abandonment, over or underpayments, penalties, and increased customer support costs. These risks occur when web or mobile app payment transactions run into issues. To avoid these issues, online retailers should create test cases, conduct periodic checks, and update their processes to ensure the system’s integrity.

From functional testing to usability testing, there are many ways to test payment processing. These five common payment gateway testing use cases illustrate the complexity of testing financial transactions across many payment platforms and devices. If you’re interested in learning more then be sure to read our ultimate guide to payments testing.

Why is Payment Testing Critical for E-Commerce?

The global e-commerce market is seeing exponential growth, thanks in large part to shifting consumer behavior. According to recent estimates, retail e-commerce sales in 2024 will exceed USD 6.3 trillion worldwide, a figure that’s expected to increase even more in the coming years. 

What does this mean for retailers? If your retail strategy doesn’t include e-commerce, you’re missing out. Many companies now rely on online transactions not just to survive but also to thrive in an increasingly competitive marketplace. 

But here’s something to think about: Despite the proliferation of various online sales channels, shopping cart abandonment rates are at a record high (70.19%). The reasons for this vary—from website errors to exorbitant shipping costs, from complicated checkout to declined credit cards.

Needless to say, e-commerce involves many moving parts, but ultimately, everything boils down to trust. This is where payments testing plays a critical role.

1. Check Digital Payments

Can the payment gateway handle various forms of digital payments? Can it process credit and debit card information from different financial institutions in multiple countries? Does it work in all the regions the business operates in and appropriately convert currencies and add taxes?

Central banks, online-only startups, pay-later programs, etc. are all accepted payment methods in addition to credit and debit cards. Payment gateway testing checks that the system can receive payment details (manually or through a third party), recognize, and accurately process them.

For shoppers without—or who would rather not use—debit or credit cards, a systematic way to test e-commerce payments helps ensure they can complete purchases using other means, such as e-wallets, bank transfers, gift cards, cryptocurrencies, and mobile wallets. 

Internet technology and e-commerce have made digital payment methods the standard. Gen Z is leading the fray with near-total adoption and use of digital payments.

2. Check for Time-Outs

What happens if a session ends or is timed out before fully processing or completing the transaction?

Testing for time-outs should explore and clarify the triggers of a time-out bug. You’ll also want to make sure your product offers time-out notifications to both customers and merchants. These notifications include simple steps to resume the purchase and finalize the sale.

3. Verify Successful Payment Confirmation

Though it may seem obvious, verifying a completed payment transaction is critical in payment gateway testing. To confirm successful payment transactions, test all purchase funnel elements to ensure the sharing of financial information between customers, merchants, and financial institutions.

As part of this, confirming that the customer receives a successful payment confirmation is essential to avoid cloned orders.

4. Verify Transaction Processes

Verify complete end-to-end gateway transaction processing under 100s of purchase scenarios, devices, O/S, and systems. This helps you mirror the behaviors and patterns used by your customers. By leveraging crowdsourced or networked testers using real devices, you guarantee full coverage.

And don’t forget transaction processes must also meet legal requirements, local regulations (including taxes), and billing standards of Android and iOS libraries.

5. Address Payment Failures

According to a 2021 study, the global economy loses USD 118.5 billion to failed payments every year. Meanwhile, in 2023, US merchants lost an estimated USD 3.8 billion to failed cross-border payments. 

Merchants know that failed payments come at a staggering cost, but research also shows that four in five companies have a hard time discovering what’s causing payments to fail.

Testing for payment fails can uncover common issues, like gateway misconfigurations that block transactions from reaching payment pages. Payments testing catches these issues before a customer receives a failed order.

If the problem lies on the customer’s end, a payment failure notification needs to be available, preferably with helpful information to rectify. Without knowing the scope of why or how payments fail, customers and dev teams can be left questioning abandoned orders.

Crowdtesting QA to Test Payments

There’s strength in numbers—and that’s no truer than in e-commerce testing. Whether that’s functional testing to ensure your payment systems are working optimally or experiential testing to understand how real users behave during checkout, crowdtesting offers unique insights that traditional testing methods may miss. 

By leveraging the power of the crowd—a community of testers from various demographics and locations can provide a thorough understanding of how your payment solutions perform under real-world conditions. This way, you can fine-tune your systems to more effectively deliver the kind of user experience your customers expect.

Many merchants lean on software testing partners to complement the testing done by in-house QA and quality engineering teams. A testing partner like Testlio means you can expand and shrink your payments gateway testing resources on-demand and within budget. Available in any global location, testers use all the devices, web platforms, and O/S combinations you’ll need for complete coverage.

Schedule a call with one of our experts and we’ll walk you through how we help e-commerce clients (and many others) with payment gateway testing.