Before putting your Shopify store online, you must perform a final check, test the checkout of your store.
Indeed, although you have perfectly configured your entire store as well as the means of payment , you must ensure that they work correctly and that your customers can finalize their orders.
Shopify offers a fictitious payment gateway “Bogus Gateway” which is a test mode in which you can create and pay for an order, like a customer, with fictitious bank information and thus check that all your checkout is working perfectly well.
In this article, you’ll learn how to enable this test mode and use it on your Shopify store.
Enable Shopify test mode
You must enable the “Bogus Gateway” payment method in your store’s third-party providers for accepting payment methods.
To do this, go to the settings (1) of your store and then to the setting named “Payment systems” (2).
From here, find the sidebar titled “Third-Party Providers” and click “Choose a Third-Party Provider”:
If Shopify offers to set up Stripe, find the “View all supported providers” link to access a list of all third-party providers available on Shopify.
In the list of third-party providers, you should have in first position the provider named “(for testing) Bogus Gateway” (1), if you cannot find it easily, do not hesitate to use the search field to filter the providers ( 2).
Click on the “(for testing) Bogus Gateway” provider to access the payment provider configuration and be able to activate it.
Activate “Bogus Gateway” by clicking on the button at the bottom of the page “Activate (for testing) Bogus Gateway”
Simulate the payment of an order with Bogus Gateway
Once Bogus Gateway is enabled on your Shopify store as a third-party payment provider, you can create an order on your store as a customer would and then proceed to checkout.
Fill in the personal information requested, choose the shipping method and then continue to payment. On this final page, a message will be displayed warning that the shop does not accept orders or actual payments, indicating that the test mode is activated.
Below, you will have the option to pay for your order with a credit card. You will not use a real credit card to pay for the order, but instead you will use a fictitious credit card that will be partly invented.
In the “Card number” field, enter a number between 1 and 3 depending on the result you want to have for the command:
- Enter “1” to simulate a successful transaction
- Enter “2” to simulate a failed transaction
- Enter “3” to simulate an exception
In the “Name on the card” field, you will enter the name of the supplier, namely “Bogus Gateway”.
For the security code, you will indicate a random 3-digit number and to finish in the expiry date you will simply have to indicate a date later than the current date.
Here is an example of the fields entered with a fictitious credit card for “Bogus Gateway”:
Continue in the order finalization process until you have processed it and have the status of your order according to the credit card number you used (1, 2 or 3).
Disable test payment method on Shopify
After having carried out all the payment tests that you had to carry out on your store, you will absolutely have to deactivate the third-party test provider for payments on your store.
In production, the only means of payment for your Shopify store should always be real and not test means of payment, otherwise your customers will be able to place orders without having to pay for their orders.
To deactivate the “Bogus Gateway” provider, go back to your store’s payment systems and settings, then click on the “Manage” link in the box dedicated to “(for testing) Bogus Gateway”:
Once on the payment service provider’s management page, scroll down to the bottom of the page to find a “Disable (for testing) Bogus Gateway” button.
Click on it to deactivate Bogus Gateway after validating the confirmation message asking if you are sure you want to deactivate this third-party provider.
Conclusion
Testing your store is essential before putting it online and your first visitors arrive on it. Checkout and therefore the payment method for orders is no exception, you should also test this functionality of your store using a third-party provider such as Bogus Gateway.
If you use a specific third-party provider such as Stripe , they have their own test mode that you can also activate to test your payment methods. The most important thing is not to use a particular third-party provider to test their checkout, but simply to test them.
