Test credit card for production?

October 21, 2016 3:14 PM

I'm working with an ecommerce startup and we need a test credit card for production testing, as in a real credit card where we can purchase and void transactions. Is this something that a credit card company provides? I basically, don't want the card to get flagged because we use it then void it continuously. This might just be, use a corporate card and they don't care, but didn't know if there was a more clean way to do this. Bonus points if there's a magical card that we can have make transactions that don't actually go through so that we can use that for automated testing.
posted by geoff. to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Depends on how far down the process you need to test. There are card numbers that just pass the checksum computations. If you need to test further, I think you'd ask your upstream processor for some test numbers to use. Probably not a great idea to use a real card for real money, even if you don't care if it gets flagged. At a minimum, you're paying the processing fee for running the transactions.
posted by spacewrench at 3:17 PM on October 21, 2016

Are you using square or have a merchant account at a bank? Sometimes your processing house will have sample numbers for you to use and then you just use keyed entry. It's been a long time since I've done that, but I used 4111111111111111 for Visa I remember.
posted by cmm at 3:18 PM on October 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Well we can use sample numbers on test instances, but if we do builds that impact production transactions we really need to make sure that the transaction passes end-to-end. Cost is not really a concern. Right now we're using a card and voiding the transactions. I'm sure this is a solved problem, just seemed like there'd be a more elegant solution then what we're doing.

Not using square, using an actual merchant account. This a medium sized ecommerce site, we're talking 10,000 transactions a month? So not Amazon level, but not small.
posted by geoff. at 3:22 PM on October 21, 2016

Yeah, based on your update, if you want to test in production, go find somebody with a company card who can live with it getting frozen, just in case. You could use a cash gift card, like one of the Visa or Mastercard ones, if you want to just pay for it and not void (those things don't void normally and it will likely get the card frozen very quickly).

Nobody's going to open a loophole in a production system with dummy numbers.
posted by Lyn Never at 3:26 PM on October 21, 2016

I've done the testing for e-comm, and the usual fix for end to end is a corporate card. The transactions don't usually get voided, because we need the shipment to go through. Then we process a refund, which is great, because we need to test the refund scenarios as well.

If cost is a factor, you can always have an invisible product set up for ten cents. (Unless you're testing sales tax on clothing in New York)
posted by politikitty at 3:39 PM on October 21, 2016 [4 favorites]

When I did this on a big system we used somebody's corporate card and reimbursed them. Agreed with politikitty that running a proper refund is the best end-to-end test, but we just had $1 transactions and it was far cheaper in company time to just eat them usually.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 4:16 PM on October 21, 2016

I do this, and we use a corp card for testing in prod. Ideally you want to have a corp card that is used exclusively for testing, to make it easier to make sure you don't miss refunding or voiding any transactions.
posted by phoenixy at 4:17 PM on October 21, 2016

Response by poster: Ok great so what we are doing is what everyone else is doing. Thanks!
posted by geoff. at 4:40 PM on October 21, 2016

Also I should add that despite doing quite a bit of payment testing in prod, I've never actually had a test card frozen for excessive refunds or transactions. The biggest problem I've had was with the Play Store, because it doesn't allow you to use the same credit card with different Google Play accounts, so we had to run around finding employees who would let us use their cards. My card was also once flagged for potential fraud when I was doing testing with $1000+ transactions in foreign currencies, but I was easily able to use the credit card company's automated system to indicate it as a legitimate charge.
posted by phoenixy at 4:52 PM on October 21, 2016

We use our own corporate cards for testing when we make changes to our POS system. Sure, we're paying the transaction fees, but we see it as a small price to pay to know it absolutely works (or, doesn't) with a "live" card.
posted by xedrik at 9:19 PM on October 21, 2016