Before you start selling, it's a good idea to take a few minutes to test your checkout and make sure everything is working as expected.
With Payhip, you have two ways to do this. You can test the checkout flow without making a real payment to review the buyer experience, or complete a full payment test to ensure your payment processors are correctly set up and ready to accept transactions.
In this article, we'll walk you through both methods so you can check the full buyer experience from checkout to post-purchase.
Test checkout without payment
If you’d like to see what your customers experience after checkout, you can test this without making a real payment.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to use a 100% off coupon at checkout. To do this, create a 100% off coupon, open your product page, and click Buy Now. Enter your email address, apply the coupon code, and then complete the purchase.
This lets you go through the full checkout process and review the post-purchase experience, including downloading your product or accessing content.
Once you’re done, you can delete the coupon or limit its usage to prevent others from using it. Alternatively, you can create a free product to test the same process.
Test checkout with a real payment
If you want to test the actual payment process, you can complete a real transaction to make sure everything is working correctly. To do this, you can temporarily set your product price to a small amount.
Once you've done that, open your product page in a different browser or an incognito window, use a different email address at checkout, and complete the purchase using a valid payment method. Make sure you are not using a card or account connected to your own payment processor.
This helps simulate a real customer purchase and confirms that your payment processors are correctly set up and ready to accept payments.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I refund myself after testing a real payment?
Yes, if you run a real transaction, you can refund it through your payment processor. More on that here: How to Refund a Transaction
Why shouldn't I use my own payment method?
Using a payment method linked to your own payment processor may cause the transaction to fail or behave differently than a real customer purchase.
Why should I use a different browser or incognito mode?
This helps simulate a real customer experience and avoids issues caused by being logged into your seller account.