Why Does the Payment Gateway Process Need to be tested?

An Online Payment Gateway is the medium that processes transactions between two parties (i.e., a merchant and a consumer). The payment is made by transferring payment information from the customer to the merchant's chosen bank account, much like a credit card or debit card. In India, there are several payment processing businesses in operation. The payment transaction consists of several phases, each of which involves a different stakeholder.

Steps in payment transactions and stakeholders involved.

According to experts, the first stakeholder in the process is the User, who puts the order, which then reaches the Merchant's web server in the form of an order. The merchant server responds to the user based on the availability of the goods. Once the user receives confirmation of the product's availability, they process the payment using the best payment gateway India that is linked to the merchant's server.

During the payment process, three stakeholders are involved: the user who uses the credit/debit card, the acquiring bank (the merchant's bank account), and the issuing bank (the user's bank account). The transaction is the last stage, in which the transaction is completed and the merchant receives payments from the user.

This stage, however, is further subdivided into two phases, the first of which is supplied by the user's issuing bank by validating the card holder's legitimacy and capacity to pay. The payment is taken from the user's account at this point, but it is not credited to the merchant. The merchant gets the money during the capture phase when the customer's payment information is sent from the user's card account to the merchant's bank account.

Need to test payment gateway

Online Payment Gateway should be safe and therefore tested in order to smoothen the selling and purchasing procedure. When paying with a credit or debit card, the Point of Sale system displays whether the transaction should be authorized or denied. Whereas, for online transactions, an analogous system that can accept or deny the transaction quickly and make the online payment process easy is required.

The tester's task here is to ensure that the entire payment cycle (receiving transactions from the online shop, recording and authenticating returns) is operating properly. This can be an issue for the merchant if any of these subcomponents fail to function properly. The payment gateway must be tested against a variety of parameters.

Tips for testing the payment gateway:

1. Availability of free isolated environment: Look for a free isolated environment (for testing and experimenting) that may be utilized for the Payment Gateway; it must be tested or developed. Having such an environment undoubtedly helps and provides the team with the added freedom to modify the tool and test as thoroughly as needed.

2. Testing should be done end-to-end: We must ensure that the transaction is thoroughly tested from beginning to conclusion. A few frequent issues include data collection and data transfer from the application to the best payment gateway India.

3. Issue resolving options: If payment fails during a transaction for any reason, the consumer should be provided an appropriate notification. A technical message such as 'Server is down' or '404 error' might mislead the consumer and impair the application's usefulness. Generic statements such as "There appears to be a difficulty with processing the transaction; please contact us at Customer Care Number" would improve the customer experience.

4. Post-production verification: The company owner will need to open a live payment processor account and set up their Merchant ID for this reason. Following setup, regress testing on the payment processor should be performed before the application and payment processor integration are made public.

Final Thoughts

The payment processor module is the most important component of any e-Commerce program that accepts payments from its consumers. As a result, it is critical to properly test this component. If a scenario is overlooked or a gap is left in the seller's sales/transactions, the user experience may suffer. As a result, testers must prepare or set up the test environment (sandboxes, response codes, gathering dummy credit card information) and develop a testing plan for both the test environment and the live/post-production release environment.