Overview
Strong and smooth e-commerce functionalities, and seamless end to end experience have become the norm, end customers have gotten used to and expect this from all e-commerce stores and brands. Given that, it is essential for merchants to ensure that their front end and UI are in sync with what they have defined in the back-end. Strategic and smart 'tests' help to achieve and ensure this sync, before making any functionality live.
This article will guide you through the process of testing your memberships offerings.
Step 1: Enabling Shopify Payments (Test mode)
The first step is setting up a test payment gateway through Shopify Payments. Here is a handy article from Shopify to help you set it up.
However, if you choose not to do so, there is another way to test your memberships, which is to set up the membership product price to 0! This would nullify the payment gateway step!
Step 2: Create a Membership Plan (Test mode)
A critical requirement to offering Memberships in your store is to first create a 'Membership' product in your Shopify admin, which your shoppers can then 'buy' on a recurring basis, to become members.
Another critical element would be to create special membership plans in your Appstle Memberships Dashboard, and associate the membership product(s) you created earlier, to that plan. Here is a handy article on Membership plan creation.
Step 3: Test the checkout process
The next step is to test out the checkout process. For this, you will need to go to the 'Member' product page that you created, assign the membership plan to, and check if the plan is visible on your page. If you do not see the membership plan automatically, please ping us on our chat widget.
The widget should look something like this:
Next, click on "Add to Cart", and Proceed to checkout. Please check for the 'pricing' and the general look and feel, but specifically look for the 'Recurring Total' label. It is this that distinguishes this checkout as a non-physical and intangible memberships purchase.
Finally, input card details for the payment. For the test purchase, you can use these dummy credentials:
Card Number: 4242 4242 4242 4242
Card Name: BG VG
Card Expiry: 01/24
CVV: 012
Step 4: Test procedures as a customer!
This test step takes you through the same UI as your potential customers when they become members in your store.
Check whether you have received the "Membership Created" email in the registered email.
Check if recurring orders are appearing in the "Memberships" tab in the Appstle Memberships Dashboard.
Step 5: Login as a customer and test the remaining features
Based on the perks you are providing in the membership plan you are testing, adopt a step by step approach to test if each perk is working.
For example, if the membership provides exclusive access to a few pages or products, test if you are in fact able to access those pages/products when you are logged in as a member.
We recommend that you test every 'perk' you are providing in different member tiers to ensure that the memberships rules are set correctly.
Next, test the 'Member Portal' to ensure that your members have the intended visibility and management control of their memberships. Go to the the customer/profile page on your store and click on the "Manage Memberships" button. Once you click on it, you can check the general functionality of the Member Portal and test it out.
Step 6: Ready to Launch
Once the complete set-up has been looked at, you can conclude whether you are good to go with launching the memberships onto your store, or if you need further customization.
Don't hesitate to reach out to us
If you have any questions about testing procedures or want to talk about any other features, please reach out to us at membership-support@appstle.com or through our live chat support. Our 24x7x365 available experts will be happy to assist you further.