Online payments gateways have transformed the landscape of online businesses. A payment gateway plays the same role for online transactions and allows businesses to accept online payments, create customer databases, and bookkeeping.
It’s like a POS machine, without which offline retail stores would have a tough time accepting payments and keeping track of accounts and inventory.
What is a Payment Gateway?
A payment gateway is a bridge that connects the customer, merchant, banks, and card networks. In the process, it encrypts and communicates personal and financial data between these parties to enable online transactions. They are becoming essential as more businesses go online, and a higher number of customers choose to shop online than offline.
What is Payment Gateway Testing?
Payment gateway testing plays an integral part in evaluating a gateway’s features. It’s important to ensure that everything works as intended and there are no underlying issues before going live with the platform. It is highly critical to maintain data integrity when customers transact.
Therefore, to provide them with a secure environment with performance, payment gateways must function a certain way.
Moreover, proper testing ensures that payments go through as intended and there are no glitches when the system tries to exchange the communication information between various parties.
Types of Payment Gateway Testing
There are several tests that a business needs to run before implementing a payment gateway. Listed below are the most crucial steps.
· Functional Testing:
Functional testing ensures that the payment gateway can work correctly with local and international currencies. This helps businesses evaluate the payment gateway’s scale, and scope should the business decision to start selling globally in the future. Moreover, this test helps return results related to payment methods, sequence, and whether the system can carry out transactions.
· Integration Testing:
This test helps evaluate if the platform is suitable for a particular business’ website or app and whether it can properly connect with bank accounts to enable fund settlements.
· Security testing:
As the name suggests, this is a crucial test since no business can risk having a payment gateway system that’s not secure enough. So, the payment gateway must pass this test to be considered for deployment.
·Performance testing:
How a payment gateway performs is crucial to running day-to-day business. You want to have a payment gateway that delivers exceptional performance while handling multiple transactions without lag. It also helps evaluate if the gateway can seamlessly support various payment methods or not.
·Settlement testing:
Once a sale has been made and the transaction has been processed successfully, the merchant needs to get paid on time. The settlement testing evaluates the payment gateway’s ability to settle payments quickly.
What are the Categories in Payment Gateway Testing?
Every test case that is a part of extensive payment gateway testing can be classified into four different categories:
- UI test Case
- Functional Test Case
- Performance Test Case
- Security Test Case
Parameters to Access in a Test Case
When subjecting a payments gateway to a test case, accessing the platform on specific parameters is vital. Here’s a brief overview of the points you must assess it for!
- Check if the platform can return a successful transaction notification message
- Check if the platform can return a notification message in case of an unsuccessful transaction
- Check if the platform can return a notification message once the online payment processing session ends
- Check the platform if it’s able to handle a user’s local currency and language properly
- Check the platform to see if the redirects work as intended
- List of payment modes available
- Ability to support strong password creation
- Check for API keys confidentiality
- Check if it supports multi-factor authentication
When comparing payment gateway companies to evaluate them for effective performance, delivery, security, and integration, ensure that they can pass the required tests. And then choose one that emerges as the most efficient platform for your business!
