A payment gateway is an application service that allows online transactions by approving payments. It encrypts sensitive details like account holder details, card numbers, etc., to safeguard the payment and prevent fraud. Irrespective of the business type, every e-commerce company must integrate a payment gateway to accept online payments while ensuring a smooth experience. Hence, ensuring proper payment gateway integration is essential. Payment gateway integration testing is a crucial step to ensure that the gateway works as expected and delivers optimum security.
Let us dig deeper into the different facets of payment gateway integration testing.
What is Payment Gateway Integration Testing?
Testing involves evaluating different features of an online payment gateway before deploying it to start accepting online payments. It aims at ensuring security, reliability, and uninterrupted performance while working. For consumers, the testing streamlines the usage with payment security in just a few clicks. For merchants, the testing process ensures seamless fund settlements in time.
Why is Payment Gateway Integration Testing Essential?
When customers shop in physical stores, they pay in cash or swipe a card through a machine to complete the purchase. While using a debit or credit card, they swipe the card through a POS machine, which approves or declines the payment. Similarly, a comparable system is required to approve or disapprove a transaction immediately for online transactions.
Customers expect a seamless payment system while shopping on an e-commerce website. They click the ‘Pay Now’ button and wait for the payment success within a few seconds. An e-commerce store must ensure that the payment cycle works fine to capture and authorise transactions. If any subcomponent does not work as expected, it can create an issue for the merchant. Testing allows them to analyse the payment processing system and evaluate if the payment gateway is actually suitable for their business and application.
What Does Integration Testing Involve?
An integrated gateway means no third party is involved at the website’s checkout stage. An e-commerce business using an integrated gateway is PCI DSS compliant, which means it is responsible for sorting, securing, and conducting verification for every transaction. Integration testing is a crucial step covering verifying the merchant’s online integration with payment processors in India. It involves the following points to demonstrate integration:
- Processing of transactions for the correct amount in a suitable currency format
- The connection between the bank and the gateway
- Successful payment processing in the correct order
- Uninterrupted and seamless communication between the banking servers
The Testing Process
After understanding the working of a payment gateway, an analyst can move to test its integration with an e-commerce platform or mobile application. A thorough study is required to ensure seamless transactions through the selected gateway. It studies all API documents across the gateway, enlisting the different response codes and how it performs across different test cards. Since the documents carry vital information necessary for payment gateway integration testing, it is crucial to have an experienced tester test it thoroughly.
A tester must verify the transaction flow through the following steps:
- Order placement
- Checking funds in the merchant account
- Confirming transaction and refund if needed
A tester requires test cards to test multiple available cards and their response codes. The tester verifies responses at both gateway and application ends to check the integration level between an e-commerce platform and a gateway. For instance, if a card’s testing indicates an expired code or insufficient funds, the same response should show up on the gateway dashboard as well. The testing aims at ensuring that there are no errors or mismatches between the messages.
When a mismatch happens, the users will get incorrect information that must be resolved before integration. Different payment gateways may have different response codes. Hence, each gateway needs independent testing to ensure clarity at all ends. Some points to check include the message and format after successful or failed transactions, page redirection, buffer time during the transaction, available payment options, etc.
Payment processors in India have become an unavoidable necessity for companies accepting online payments. Since business growth and cyber fraud go hand in hand in recent times, an e-commerce business owner should never ignore even a minor step in the integration testing process. Testing the gateway ensures the utmost convenience to the customers and security to the merchants.
