How Do I Place a Test Order?

A test order is the single best way to confirm your store actually works end-to-end before real customers arrive — it catches checkout, payment, and order-visibility problems that are easy to miss just by looking at settings pages. Here’s how to run one properly.

What a good test order checks

• Can a customer browse your store, add a product to cart, and reach checkout without errors?
• Does checkout calculate price, shipping, and any tax correctly?
• Does at least one payment method actually process successfully?
• Does the order appear correctly in Commerce > Sales > All Orders afterward?
• Does the customer (and you) receive an order confirmation?

How to run the test

1. Open your store’s live or preview URL as a customer would — not through the dashboard.
2. Add a real product to your cart and go through checkout normally.
3. Complete payment using a real (small-value) transaction or your payment provider’s test mode, if one is available.
4. Confirm you receive an order confirmation as the customer.
5. Go to Commerce > Sales > All Orders in your dashboard and confirm the order appears with correct details.
6. If the order was a real charge, refund or cancel it via Commerce > Sales > Refund Orders or Cancel Orders once you’ve confirmed everything works.

If something goes wrong

A failed test order is far better to discover now than after a real customer hits the same issue. Common culprits are an unverified or misconfigured payment method (see How Do I Configure Payments Before Launch), a shipping rate that isn’t set for the region you tested (see How Do I Configure Shipping Before Launch), or a product that’s out of stock or unpublished. Work through these in order — payment issues first, since checkout can’t complete without one.

Test more than once if anything changes

💡 Tip: Re-run a test order any time you change payment settings, shipping rates, or make major theme changes. It takes a few minutes and catches problems before they cost you a real sale.