Getting Started With WooCommerce Testing [A Beginner’s Guide]

Benefits of WooCommerce Testing for your next website

Web applications powered by the WooCommerce plugin run on more than 7 million active WordPress installations. This scale was made possible due to the following benefits it offers to its developers and users.

Providing a complete eCommerce solution

A major benefit of WooCommerce is its offerings to the user. When we install WooCommerce on our WordPress website, it does not care what type of products we choose to put up on the marketplace. Whether a physical item or subscription-based digital content, WooCommerce provides a full-fledged platform for each type of business.

In addition, WooCommerce also comes with features such as “manage order” sections, “shipping” sections, and managing your inventory that helps in quick implementation and alterations of back-end-related information.

A long list of supported extensions

WooCommerce comes with built-in features for its users, as discussed in the previous point. However, if, as a business owner, you wish to add new features according to your choice that are not available in WooCommerce, you can do that by installing extensions.

WooCommerce extension is a marketplace where people can choose and install additional extensions to enhance the functionality of their WooCommerce web applications.

For example, Google Analytics is a tool by Google to understand the website’s analytics. It answers questions about which geographical area most of your users come from and which platforms these users use the most. It is a very important tool to reiterate your plans according to your audience and provide them with a better experience. This can be attached to your WooCommerce website using the Google Analytics extension.

Responsive in nature

A responsive nature is the fluid nature of a web application to mold itself according to the screen size automatically. Apart from scaling up or down the dimensions of web elements and the web page completely, many things change when we talk about responsiveness.

For example, considering the font size of the content, it needs to scale up on smaller devices but not too much because of the distance between a mobile device and the user, which is very less than between a desktop screen and the user. Sometimes, we would want to upload different images on different screen devices, which is also a part of responsive design. The image below projects the difference clearly:

Fortunately, we don’t need to work this hard when building our web application with WooCommerce. The plugin takes care of the responsive elements from its code, and all the business owner needs to do is install the plugin.

Note: Check the responsiveness of your websites now. Try TestMu AI Now!

Easy security integration mechanism

WooCommerce does not come with an in-built security mechanism to protect your web application from various vulnerabilities such as spam, data breach, etc. WooCommerce offers smooth integration with Jetpack, made by WordPress experts in the security field. Jetpack offers complete security solutions to business owners that also include real-time backups.

SEO Optimized

Search engine optimization is an important process to rank your website higher in Google rankings. If your website is not SEO optimized, it does not matter how good its content, offerings, or product line is. People generally do not remember the website but just Google out their requirements. In such a competitive world, it becomes extremely important to release a web application that is SEO friendly.

WooCommerce testing applications have the advantage of being SEO friendly as WordPress is an SEO-friendly content management system. In addition to it. WooCommerce applies its SEO tactics to keep websites in the competition. However, one small note to share here is to check once before installing third-party themes or themes that do not have reviews. A theme can create a negative impact on the responsive nature of the website as it contains UI elements attached to it.

Support community and popularity

WooCommerce today counts more than 7 million active WordPress installations, a scale that keeps its community large and active. The more people use the plugin, the more problems they face and the more awareness they get from open communities.

Additionally, WooCommerce testing provides its support system by professionals and expert developers on the Slack channel. As a user, you can use that to resolve your issues while operating on the WooCommerce testing platform.

How to prevent WooCommerce checkouts and payment failures?

In this blog on WooCommerce testing, we have the following options to test your checkout and payment methods on your WooCommerce testing web application:

• Using Cash on Delivery (COD) as a default alternative.
• Using plugins available for WooCommerce and WordPress.
• Check payments from WooCommerce.
• Third-party payment gateways.
• Online cross-browser testing solutions.

Using Cash on Delivery as a default alternative

Cash on delivery is an option where a user does not pay for the product beforehand but only when the product is delivered. It is a good alternative when you think your payments are failing or are not 100% reliable. Cash on delivery is one option that the user prefers even more than online payments.

Many eCommerce platforms compete for the same shoppers today, and your web application is one among them. The idea of sharing confidential card or bank details creates trust issues for many people, which keeps cash on delivery a popular choice even though unpaid orders carry a higher risk of cancellation, leaving the eCommerce business to cover the shipping cost. To limit that risk, many stores cap COD checkout to orders under a set order value.

Using plugins available for WooCommerce testing and WordPress

A safer method to avoid online payment failure on your web application is by using the plugins available for WooCommerce testing or WordPress. Like we install any functionality on WordPress, we can follow similar steps to install plugins related to payments on our web application. The rest of the job is taken care of by the plugin itself.

To download and install a plugin on your web application, visit WordPress’s official plugin page or WooCommerce.

Next, search for your payment plugin with the keyword “payment” or something similar. As per popularity, reliability, and trust build is concerned, stripe payment is the most used payment plugin with WooCommerce testing.

You can download the first one and integrate it into your application.

Using “Check” payments from WooCommerce

Online transaction failure is a major concern for businesses and WooCommerce developers. Sometimes, if you are installing a plugin, it might not work as smoothly as you wished it would. To battle this issue, WooCommerce testing has introduced a “check” (or previously called “cheque”) payment feature.

A check payment is a gateway provided by WooCommerce that does not take online payments. Instead, it keeps them in the queue as “order completed.” The business owner has to arrange payment and ship the order from their end manually. It is a method to give a sense of order completion without relying on payments. Due to this nature, it is also an excellent method for test payments.

• To enable this method, visit WooCommerce -> Settings -> Payments and enable the Check payment toggle.

• Next, click “Set up” to set up the check payment feature.
• You can configure your settings here and save them once done.

• The check feature will be enabled in your account.

Third-party payment gateways

The safest and most reliable option is a third-party payment gateway. Merchant gateways such as Billdesk and PayU are built just to let users complete transactions on your web application. They are robust and have servers that handle multiple transactions simultaneously at the same time. It is also very rare that these gateways face any downtime, so they are highly reliable.

The only pitfall you would face in integrating a payment gateway is that it can get a bit technical. Payment gateways are extremely secure and must be carefully integrated into the web application. All the endpoints and authorization credentials need to align for a successful transaction to take place. If you are technically sound or can hire a developer to integrate the payment gateway, it could be the best option you would get while releasing a WooCommerce testing web application on the Internet.

Also, note that even though the uptime of third-party payment gateways is high, it does not guarantee a 100% value. Therefore, it is always advisable to integrate multiple payment gateways in your web application.

Online Cross browser Testing Solutions

With the above sections in this WooCommerce tutorial, I hope you can finalize your payment method and integrate it with your web application. A somewhat similar process can be followed for checkout modules too. You can install extensions from WooCommerce or WordPress plugins to enable checkout services the way you like. Adding another section for the checkout section will be repetitive.

Whatever you choose to go through, you need to test the integrated system to see if it is working accordingly. For this, you need an online test infrastructure with all the mobile and desktop browsers installed on their system. For our demonstration, we will use TestMu AI, a cross browser testing platform that hosts 3000+ browsers and operating systems over a real device cloud.

You can also subscribe to the TestMu AI YouTube Channel and stay updated with the latest tutorials and updates on web app testing.

You can choose any target OS, browser, version, or resolution and perform WooCommerce testing for payment, checkout, or anything between the ends.

Step 1: To start your WooCommerce testing, first, sign up for free on TestMu AI.

Step 2: Go to Real Time Testing → Browser Testing for online browser testing.

Step 3: Enter your WooCommerce testing website URL and select the target OS, browser, and browser version.

Step 4: Press START to launch the testing session on TestMu AI’s online cloud infrastructure.

Now you can start testing WooCommerce’s payment and checkout workflows.