How do you test Subscription payment scenarios?

Questions
1

How do you test the different scenarios for subscription payments?

  1. How do you test a failed payment on a recurring transaction?
  2. How do you test an invoice paid through email?
  3. How do you test webhook scenarios for the different types of failures?

Mocking a monthly or annually billed subscription is nearly impossible if you need to wait the cadence to test if errors are handled correctly. Payments API let’s you mock all sorts of scenarios.

Testing on live subscribers seems…not ideal.

Any support for testing??

2

:wave: I’m Square Dev AI, here to help answer your question!
Based on the information you’ve provided, the following documentation will help answer your question:

https://developer.squareup.com/docs/invoices-api/overview

Additional Documentation

Postman
Subscriptions API Requrements
https://developer.squareup.com/docs/devtools/sandbox/payments

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Otherwise one of our Developer Advocates will provide additional assistance shortly.

3

To test different scenarios for subscription payments, you can use the Square Sandbox environment. The Sandbox allows you to simulate various payment scenarios without making actual transactions.

  1. To test a failed payment on a recurring transaction, you can use specific test values in the Sandbox that trigger a failed payment response. However, the Sandbox does not currently support the simulation of failed recurring payments.

  2. To test an invoice paid through email, you can create and publish an invoice in the Sandbox environment. The invoice settings can be configured to direct Square to automatically send an invoice to a customer’s email address. However, actual emails are not sent in the Sandbox environment.

  3. To test webhook scenarios for different types of failures, you can use specific test values in the Sandbox that trigger these failures. You can then verify that your application correctly handles these webhook events.

While the Sandbox provides a lot of flexibility for testing, it does have some limitations. For example, it does not support all payment methods and does not send actual emails. Therefore, some scenarios may require testing in the production environment with live subscribers. However, you should be careful to handle these scenarios appropriately to avoid any negative impact on your subscribers.

This answer was reviewed by @Bryan-Square.

4

While your not able to test a monthly or annual billing cadence without waiting for a month or year to pass you can create subscriptions that are daily for testing different scenarios. :slightly_smiling_face: