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.

1. Check payment card numbers

Can the payment gateway handle credit and debit card information from different financial institutions in multiple countries and a mix of currencies?

Central banks, online-only startups, pay-later programs, etc., are all accepted payment methods with different card number formats. Payment gateway testing checks that the system can receive card information (manually or through a third party), recognize, and accurately process it.

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 fails

If there has been a failed transaction, at what point did the transaction fall through? 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 fails 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.

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.

Request a short demo of our platform, and we’ll walk you through how we help e-commerce clients (and many others) with payment gateway testing.