By Ran Rachlin
Most people are using various types of mobile applications and make payments online from time to time. M-commerce has become a common thing for millions of individuals all over the world. The demand for unique, handy, and exceptionally easy-to-use digital solutions that allow making purchases online is constantly growing. Consequently, the competition between the companies is becoming fiercer than ever. But how to impress your prospective clients?
The truth is that a perfect interface, polished design, and rich functionality are no longer the only key parameters of a successful digital product. The customer should have a wide choice of various payment methods to pay for the goods and services in a fast and flawless way. Therefore, each app should provide access to using the most popular payment alternatives for the maximum comfort of its users.
The times when debit and credit cards were the only payment methods used by most customers have passed. Currently, many clients prefer using PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, digital wallets, and even cryptocurrencies for making online purchases. If you want to become a leader in the chosen field, and you offer a paid service or product, it is crucial to offer your customer the choice of how to pay in your app. Moreover, the payment process should be understandable, fast, and safe.
Top Challenges In The Field of Online Payments
There is nothing new that many digital products have target audiences in different countries. Although the interface of your app might look similar for all locations, this rule is not working for payment methods offered to customers in various countries. The reason is that currently, there is no global payment system that can be used in all the countries worldwide. For example, the customers from the United States prefer using Venmo, while most Europeans stick to Sofort and Ideal. If you are targeting an audience from Israel, don’t forget about BitPay, or PayBox.
If you would like to take a leading position in a particular niche, increase profits, or attract more customers, it is vital to pay attention to payment testing. In other words, it is necessary to complete a global beta test network payment with real devices in the chosen countries and locations. Most companies usually test with real cards, digital wallets, and other payment options and hire quality assurance professionals located in the countries of their target audience. But how to test the payment process if you have customers in many countries? Your clients might be using hundreds of various devices and a number of different payment methods! Is it possible to cope with this challenge? Sure!
What Is Payment Testing? Top Methods and Practices
The process of paying for the product or service is an inevitable part of using millions of applications. Therefore, you will need to do payment testing in the most precise and top-notch way to make sure your users will be satisfied with using your app. Below are just a few must-do steps you might follow during the payment driving test.
Check In-market Specifics
Sometimes it happens that the payments made from specific countries fail to be processed. What is the reason for such a common issue? In many cases, you didn’t pay enough attention to the laws and regulations related to your field and the sphere of online payments in a particular country. These might be unexpected issues with security or taxes. To avoid this problem, it is necessary to test payment gateway on real devices in these countries. Using professional QA experts located in the targeted country, who will act like a real user and proceed with the real payment, will definitely become a win-win solution.
Don’t Stick to Happy Path Only
All people are different and might choose different payment methods, as well as the ways to make purchases in your application. To put it short, there are usually several alternatives on how to pay in a particular app. That is why testers don’t go through the basic process and report on successful or not successful operations. They use various ways to make a purchase, make screenshots and record videos, discover the pain points and bugs in the digital product, and might even provide recommendations on how to make your app better.
There should always be room for QA experts to use different test cases for payment gateway. It is important to test various unexpected scenarios, do stress testing, and check the digital product on different operating systems.
Always Test the App In Real World
Using virtual machines for testing is surely good but not enough for making an advanced check-up of your application. It is important to test the digital product in real-life conditions and use live transactions with real money. Moreover, it is extremely necessary to cover the maximum number of devices, carriers, and types of payment. For example, testing one Visa card might not be enough for effective payment testing. What if the app works great with debit cards but fails on a certain step with credit cards? In theory, both cards should be acceptable. However, this is not always true in real environments.
The same thing is about testing in different locations. Your app might easily proceed with payments made by customers in the United States but have some issues with Canadian payments or European ones.
Type of Testing to Conduct
What are the crucial types of testing related to payment you need to pay attention to? Let’s find out the most necessary ones:
- Functionality testing. It is important to check all the monetary calculations, adding the local taxes, the checkout process, and other functions that are connected to making payments.
- Integration testing. The payment process is usually a complex process that integrates the users with banks, credit card companies, service providers, retailers and other parties. All these connections must be checked in detail to make sure the integration is done correctly.
- Performance testing. Double-check whether the payment system can handle a large number of users and large volumes of data simultaneously. Moreover, the product should handle it in a fast way with no delays or errors.
- Security testing. One of the vital steps in payment testing is to confirm that the information is encrypted and to ensure end to end protection of data.
The Main Metrics To Measure Customer Experience
There are plenty of ways to measure the client experience of using your application. Here are just a few most popular techniques that are worth your attention:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
- Customer Retention Rate
- Customer Churn Rate
- First Contact Resolution (FCR)
- Monthly Active Users (MAU)
Each company should be familiar with the different methods of measuring customer experience. It is possible to choose the best solutions for your company to make sure that the payment system fully meets the customer’s expectations. The fact is that encouraging prospective customers to make a purchase and leading them to proceed to check out is the main purpose of any company. Thus, it is essential to make sure the client has a top-notch user experience when using the service.
How To Earn Money With Ubertesters
Ubertesters is one of the leading crowd testing services that allow customers to test their app in a real-life environment. Ubertesters hires QA experts in multiple countries who are ready to test different digital products on various devices, carriers, and operating systems.
Payment testing is extremely popular among customers today and the demand is high for testers that are able to perform such payment testing as part of the Ubertesters global community of testers. Thus, if you have several payment methods that you use, and wish to earn extra money in your free time for testing – just register to become a tester with Ubertesters.
If you would like to join our team, feel free to register as a tester and go through a short certification process. You will need to report on all payment methods you have and wait for a test project. A tester can earn anywhere between $10-$15 for a simple short testing process of a few minutes, up to $50, or even $100 per test cycle (depending on the product complexity and testing requirements). We are ready to welcome new professionals! [Text Wrapping Break]
About the Author
Ran Rachlin is the co-founder & CEO of Ubertesters, the global leader in crowd testing services. Ran has massive global experience, managing and leading new initiatives from inception to implementation and significant sales as well as managing large global organizations in different countries. Ran is a speaker in several industry events and is known for his unique view of the QA and testing world.