How to make safe Payment Testing

While we shop in any brick-and-mortar store, we swipe our credit or debit cards through the POS (Point of sale) machine. Similarly, in the case of online payment, we do transactions through different payment gateways. From a customer's perspective, the payment process should be seamless and take minimum time to accept or decline. 

Through Payment Testing, organizations check a payment gateway's security, reliability, and performance, while making sure the process offers a seamless and user-friendly experience to the buyers. This testing methodology ensures safe transactions between user and seller using encryption and security best practices.

Why is Payment Testing essential?

When testing the quality of an eCommerce or any online retail website that enables online payments,  the payment section plays a vital role in the customer experience quotient. Especially for eCommerce platforms, if the payment interfaces do not work well, this can drastically impact sales, brand image, and customer delight. And repetitive issues may even convert your loyal clients to detractors.

During a payment transaction, customers need to provide sensitive information like their credit card number, CVV number, banking details, etc. It is very important to ensure that all the sensitive information is transmitted in an encrypted form and that the channel is secure. 

Customers never actually see the security part. They can only have a perception of security. And the experience of the payment process leaves an impression on the buyer's mind, good or bad, whatever it is.

How does Payment Testing help to improve CX?

As the payment process is crucial for both the seller and the buyer, any mishap in the payment transaction snatches the peace of mind of both entities. There are two different aspects of a safe transaction.

• The user experience, or in this case the perception of safety

• The actual safety and security of the payment transaction

Therefore, you should perform separate analyses to check and enhance both components.

CX analysis: It is vital to understand how the user thinks about safety during transactions and whether they feel safer than the competitors' websites. CX analysis and benchmarking provides insights to check customers' perceptions during the payment process.

PenTest and VA: Through pen testing methodology, WhiteJar performs the simulated cyberattack in the system to assess the exploitable vulnerabilities. Thanks to one of the few existing ethical hacker communities, we simultaneously perform security tests on the two following systems.

Hosted Payment Gateway

The hosted payment gateway method redirects the customers to the gateway links for payment processing. After the transaction, the customer is again brought back to the eCommerce websites. In this process, there is no need to have a seller id. PayPal, Noche, and WorldPay are some of the examples.

Shared Payment Gateway

Unlike the hosted payment gateway, this process allows customers to stay on the eCommerce website and perform the transaction. The buyer is directed to the payment page during the payment process, but this is done on the eCommerce page. As there is no need to leave the ecommerce website, this process is considered safer and more convenient. Stripe and eWay, are some of the examples of shared gateways.

Essential checklists for safe Payment Testing

Before performing safe testing of payment gateways, the essential checklist below helps avoid mistakes.

• Collect the essential information and data from dummy cards

• Gather information on the payment gateways like Google pay, PayPal, etc

• Get the documents of payment gateways with error codes

• Gather in-depth information on the amount related points which pass the query string or variable or session

• In addition to the payment gateway, check the application language

• Know the different settings like currency format, subscriber data, etc., for the payment gateway.

Conclusion

Testing the payment process is critical as it is directly linked with the safety of money transfer. A missed scenario can adversely impact the customer experience. Therefore, the payment process should be fast and error-free. Customers share their personal and financial information and worry about the security of those data. They will never return to the websites where they feel their financial information is not safe.

It's imperative to set up a testing environment with all relevant information like sandboxes, gather dummy credit card information, response codes, etc. And a well-planned testing strategy can lead to successful testing of the payment gateways. Luckily enough, UNGUESS allows you to run both types of tests fast and at any time needed.