Placing a test order allows you to see the buying experience on your store firsthand. Placing test orders can help you monitor your site flow and usefulness, test new products or changes, and see how offers work on the store.
Why Place a Test Order
Testing your store is an important part of managing your online business. Knowing how products appear, how offers work, and how the shopper sees and interacts with your store is an important step in optimizing your store for the best shopper experience.
There are many different reasons to place a test order. The most common reason is to see the buying process from beginning to end so you can locate any problems or confusing areas. This includes how shoppers navigate and find products on your store, how the checkout process is completed, and which email notifications shoppers get when they complete an order.
Another common reason to place a test order is to see how marketing offers are triggered to ensure they appear and discount as expected. Those tests are usually done when a new offer is created or before a large marketing campaign is started on your store.
Other reasons to place a test order include testing how your store looks, how localized content appears, how pricing works, and how digital rights are issued.
Design Site vs. Live Site
There are two versions of your store you can use to place a test order. The "design" version includes any changes you have made but not deployed. The "live" version shows your deployed products, offers, and so on and is what is available to the general public. Whether you use the live version or the design version for a test order depends on whether you want to test your store as it is now or how it will be when you deploy certain changes (such as new offers or products).
What Gets Tested
When you place a test order most of the standard processes that are run against a real order can be selected to run for the test order. This includes shopper email notifications, fraud checks, export controls, and the denied parties list (DPL) check.
Physical Products and Test Orders
Test orders do not trigger physical fulfillment so if you want to test the fulfillment of a physical product you must place a live order (place the order as if you were a real shopper and pay for the order using a real payment method).
Digital Rights and Test Orders
If you use Global Commerce or SoftwarePassport to manage your digital rights then digital rights will be issued if you place an order for a product that has digital rights set up. The codes that are issued are real codes but they are not deducted from the list of digital rights for the product (meaning the code is real but it will be issued again when a real order is placed for the product).
If you are using another solution for your digital rights then digital rights may be issued for a test order but it depends on how your digital rights solution is integrated with Global Commerce. Contact your Store Operations team if you have questions.
Payments and Test Orders
When you place a test order you can only use a credit card as payment and you must use a specific credit card number for the payment to be validated and the order to be submitted (see Placing Test Orders for more information about how to place a test order). No other payment methods can be used for a test order. You can, however, place a real order using any other valid payment method (keep in mind that the payment will be processed as a real order as well).
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