eCommerce QA Testing: Thinking Outside the (Sand)Box
Credit card purchases over web and mobile devices have become one of the fastest growing segments of the economy. This means that, as an eCommerce or service company, you have to diligently guard those transactions. That requires careful eCommerce QA testing with the array of cards supported by your site.
Some of this work can be accomplished in sandboxes with test card numbers that are keyed into both the site and any third-party authorization service. However, QA-level testing exercises the system against a known set of card numbers and card approval states. This carries the risk of looking for bugs where it’s easy to see them. Corner cases, especially, are liable to be missed and, with credit cards, all cases are important. At some point, you really need to test the entire process from front to rear using genuine personal credit cards to make real purchases.
Test with Real Credit Cards
A purchase performed with a personal card goes through all the fraud protection and data security features of both your site and your third-party authorization services. Thorough credit card purchase testing exercises the entire system from end-to-end the same way real purchases will and supports verification of every feature that supports these transactions. With card number hacking and card fraud becoming ever greater threats, this type and level of testing should become a regular part of any feature addition or bug fix.
QualityLogic has long recognized the necessity of performing tests against software systems with real-world conditions and parameters. We maintain a selection of credit cards that have been created as personal charge accounts with all the major card services. We currently support American Express, MasterCard, Visa and Discover as well as payment services such as PayPal.