Before going live with your site it's important to test your sales process and other customer experiences to make sure that everything is functioning as you expect. It's better to find any misconfigurations before you have real customers visiting the site and risk providing a customer experience that you didn't intend.
We're big fans of testing so we've made accomplishing this a priority in MemberMouse. Here are the different options available to you:
1. Staging License – If you have heavy modifications to your site, or need to do development work, a staging license is perfect for those needs. Every MemberMouse account comes with a free staging license which can be used on any development site that's not open to public use. All you have to do is Submit a New Support Ticket with the staging site URL and we will promptly create the license for you.
2. Preview Your Site – When you're logged in as an administrator, you'll be able to preview your site as different members who have different levels of access so you can see what they see. More on Using the MemberMouse Preview Bar. You can also view these pages in a test account either in a different branded browser (Firefox, Chrome, etc) or in a Private/Incognito tab. Most newer browser versions have these options and it will allow you to see exactly what your customer sees while leaving your main browser logged in to your admin account.
3. Test Payment Service – We have a test payment integration that you can use while you're building your site so that you run through the entire sales/upsell process as a customer would without spending any real money. This test payment integration also has a mode which allows you to do testing On Demand so that even after you go live you'll be able to run through tests without interrupting your site operations. This is useful when you release new courses in the future. More on using the test payment service and the different modes. and the different modes.
IMPORTANT: If you're using the Test Payment Service and have it in Always On mode while testing your site make sure to switch it to On Demand mode or turn off the Test Payment Service before going live. If the Test Payment Service is in Always On mode this means that all payments will be treated as tests.
4. Test Purchases – When you have chosen a payment provider to go with (i.e. Stripe, PayPal, etc), we support test modes when possible so that you can run through your entire sales/upsell process as customer would, using your chosen payment provider without spending real money. You can view more information in our individual testing articles:
5. Test Customer Data – When you're testing you can setup test data in MM so that the checkout form is automatically filled out each time you want to run a test. This saves you time by automatically entering test data each time you want to run through things. You can learn how to configure test data in our Speed Up Testing Using Test Data article.
Important Note about Test Subscription Purchases
Please keep in mind that during the course of testing your site, if you….
1. Make one or more test purchases of a subscription product AND
2. Make these purchases using either our test payment service or a payment service that supports card-on-file functionality (i.e Stripe, Braintree, Authorize.net CIM)
…this means that our scheduling server is keeping track of these subscriptions. If you have done both of these or you are not sure if you have, DO NOT delete any of your MemberMouse database tables prior to going live. Deleting data that MemberMouse depends on in order to function will interfere with the billing of real subscriptions after the site goes live.