Understand Site Testing

Once your products and components are built, simulate real usage before you sell anything. Testing confirms your configuration behaves the way you expect, and shows you what your customers actually experience.

WARNING: Don't take a site live until you've tested it thoroughly. Live sites process real credit cards, and a misconfiguration reaches paying customers directly.

Sandbox sites

Once you have created a Site that matches your product offering in test mode, use this sandbox site to sign up subscribers, cancel subscribers, and reactivate subscriptions. Your goal is to simulate the life cycle of a subscription, so you're better equipped to handle subscriber questions once the site goes live.

Important: A sandbox is a Site that is in test mode that contains real versions of your products, but uses fake/test credit card data to simulate transactions.

Site modes

A Site is always in one of two modes:

• Test Mode - Connects only to test payment gateways, such as an Authorize.Net developer account. You can freely delete products and subscriptions using the Clear Data option.
• Live Mode - Accepts live credit cards through your gateway. Your gateway needs to be in live mode too.

Important: Maxio clears old test data automatically. Subscriptions on a test site are eligible for removal once they're more than 6 months old and their state hasn't changed in that time. Don't rely on a test site as a long-term record.

Related information

For how a test site behaves and where it differs from live, see the Understand Test Sites help article.

For a structured checklist to work through before going live, see the Test Your Site Before Going Live help article.