Test your e-commerce payment processor
I mean, do you really want to find out that it isn’t working two months later as I did?
Published first on Handwritten.
https://squigglestore.com/test-your-e-commerce-payment-processor/
One of the first things I set up with my e-commerce store was the payment processor. (I mean, I know, without it it’s not a store.)
Originally, I had gone with PayPal, but due to a few constraints here in Brazil, as soon as Stripe opened its Beta for me, I jumped over to it.
Now, I’m a brand-new store with little marketing, but after two months I had yet to see any sales. But everything looked ok, so I thought that maybe the problem was with the marketing.
I am moving to a new apartment though, and I figured, what kind of artist doesn’t have their own art in their house? So, I decided to buy my favorite piece at the time: The Mountain Range Canvas.
Since I was going to buy it, I figured I should test the consumer flow on the website. And a good thing too.
Much to my surprise, I found out that I couldn’t buy it. Turns out Stripe has a limitation in Brazil that you can only buy in Brazilian Real if you use a Brazilian card.
So, I overhauled the website so that I could continue. But it still struck me as strange since most of my customers should be from the US and Europe.
But, you know, I figured that now everything would be right, so I tried again, to no avail.
Turns out I hadn’t connected one of the API keys correctly to Stripe and it simply wouldn’t process payments. So even though people were trying to buy my products (according to the analytics) they couldn’t and would end up giving up.
So, I guess the moral of this short story is: Test your website!
I really should have known to do this since I’m a developer, and I won’t make the same mistake again. But it did cost me a few hundred dollars to learn this lesson, one that you should learn from my mistake.
You should always test the mission critical parts of your system at least. Don’t be a dummy like me. Test your stuff.
