Test Your Site Before Going Live

Testing a Site goes beyond creating products and signing up subscribers. The functionality below is what matters most during testing and what you keep using once the Site is live, so the list doubles as a set of features worth offering your subscribers and Site administrators. It is alphabetical rather than chronological, so work through it in whatever order suits your setup.

Billing Portal

Give your Subscribers a way to manage their subscription by enabling the Billing Portal.

• The Billing Portal can be enabled through the Configuring Billing Portal Options help article.
• Configure which features your subscribers can reach in the Billing Portal, per the same help article.

Once you've enabled the Billing Portal, use your test subscriptions to view the Billing Portal for your Site. Test initiating cancellations and updating contact information.

See the Understand the Billing Portal help article.

Dunning

Use Advanced Billing's prebuilt dunning strategies to collect charges from subscriptions that are in the past due state.

• Advanced Billing's automated Dunning Strategy can be enabled by following the instructions in Configure Credit Card Dunning.
• Select a Dunning Strategy to collect past due charges. Choose from one of the pre-configured options in the same help article.

Testing notes

You can force a subscription into the past due state with a few steps from within your test site.

1. Delete the current payment profile for a subscription, from the Subscription Summary page.
2. Change the next billing date on the subscription to the current timestamp, also from the Subscription Summary page.
3. Wait for the subscription to attempt renewal without a card on file. It moves into the past due state and the dunning process starts.
4. Inspect the email archives for results of the dunning emails.
5. Allow additional days to pass to see the dunning process play out.

Invoices

If you plan to use the invoice payment method, generate test invoices in your sandbox account before going live. Inspect the look and feel of your invoices, and learn how to receive payments and add charges to them.

• Learn how to enable invoice billing in the Manage Invoices Settings help article.
• Understand how to receive invoice payments by cash, check, or credit card in the Record and Manage Invoice Payments help article.
• Learn to toggle a subscription from the automatic-based payment method to the invoice-based payment method.

Testing notes

If your business uses invoices, test as much of the invoice functionality as possible before going live:

• Create an invoice, per the Create an Ad-Hoc Invoice help article.
• Receive a payment on an invoice, per the Record and Manage Invoice Payments help article.
• Inspect your invoices, per the Filter, Sort, and Export Invoices help article.

Set up individual user accounts

Before you exit the testing phase of your site, set up every individual user of the Advanced Billing site with their own account. Each account can be given an individual set of restrictions to protect sensitive information and restrict editing of products and other settings.

See Setup User Access and Permissions for how to set up users with restricted settings.

Payment gateways

As you transition your Advanced Billing Site from test to live, see Troubleshoot Payment Gateway Configuration Issues for common issues you may encounter during the changeover.

Products

By this point you know the basics of products. The articles below cover the ground between a working setup and a well-configured one, and are worth reading before you take the site live.

• Learn about product price points. Advanced Billing allows you to create multiple price points for a single product. Each price point can have different pricing and frequencies. Subscriptions can then be moved between price points.
• Learn to organize your products by Product Family. Create groups of products so that you and your staff stay organized when working with the application. Segment your product offering into clear, concisely labeled Product Families.

Related information

For the broader concepts behind this checklist, see the Testing Overview help article.

For a narrower walkthrough of core testing tasks, see the Test Site Basics help article.

Once your checklist is complete, see the Enable Site Live Mode help article to go live.