As you get started with Outseta, you'll want to test your sign-up process and payments end-to-end. This article details some best practices for testing your sign-up process and payments with Outseta.
Prerequisites:
- Connect Outseta to Stripe
- Add at least one pricing plan
- Add Outseta's sign up embed to your website
With these items completed, let's get to testing!
Connect to Stripe in Test Mode
Our recommended method for testing payments involves connecting Outseta to your Stripe account in while using Stripe in Test Mode.
1. If you've already connected Outseta to Stripe, navigate to go to BILLING > SETTINGS within Outseta and click CLEAR STRIPE SETTINGS.
2. Once you've done that, you can use the drop down arrow on the Connect Stripe button to reconnect to Stripe using Test Mode.
3. You can now sign up and test payments on your website freely using Stripe's test credit card data.
Create an inexpensive plan and test live
If you want to test payments "live" you can create an inexpensive plan—say a $5 pricing plan—then actually subscribe to that plan. Please note that this approach will not work if you set up a $1 plan—that amount is too small for Stripe to capture, so we recommend that you use a $5 plan at a minimum if you use this approach.
This allows you to test payments with live credit card data without incurring significant costs—you can always refund the payment from within Outseta as well.
Important testing best practices
Here are a few other pointers to ensure that you're testing your sign-up process and payments successfully.
Initial subscription payments will be processed immediately
When a new customer subscribes, their initial payment will be collected immediately—assuming you have your account set to Automatic mode on the BILLING > SETTINGS page.
If you test in Manual mode, you will see invoices created on the BILLING > INVOICES page but you won't see any charges reflected in Stripe.
Test adding new subscriptions with unique email addresses
If you're testing payments and are signing up multiple times with the same email address, you may run into problems and likely won't have the same user experience that new subscribers would. This is because we treat new sign-ups from email addresses that already exist in Outseta a bit differently. There are two ways to ensure you're experiencing the sign-up experience end-to-end as a new customer would:
- Sign up each time with a unique email address, or;
- Sign up with the same email address, but before each consecutive sign up delete the pre-existing Account and People records that were created by the previous sign up. It's important to note that you need to delete the Account record first, then the Person record.
If you need any help, please don't hesitate to reach out at support(at)outseta.com.