Why you should ALWAYS test your checkout

Every once in a while I come across a case that reminds me of how important it is to test your checkout process, even if only to make sure it works. This week my coworker Brian came across such a problem on the site of a leading reseller of calendars.

This week Brian decided to buy a couple of calendars off of calendars.com and ship them to his brother. In so doing he found a classic e-commerce error—one so easy to detect, yet so common that I had to write about it.

Lots of sites, especially smaller ones, use services such as Paypal to process payments. Dealing with credit card processing can be hugely tricky. Many smaller companies with smaller technical teams opt to use systems, such as Paypal, which promise to simplify the process of payment processing.

The problem is that integrating these kinds of systems can have unforeseen consequences and produce problems at odd times.

In Brian’s case, this is exactly what happened.