Testing The Full Subscription Life Cycle

What Is the Full Life Cycle?

The “Full Life Cycle” is all the stages and actions a subscription can possibly go through from the time a customer signs up until that customer cancels.

This test is meant to cover the core subscription features provided by Subscribe Pro on your e-commerce website by moving through each possible step. This includes testing creation of a subscription and saving a credit card, making changes to the subscription, and seeing recurring orders being placed by the subscription.

Outline

Steps

Step 1 - Subscription Sign-up

It is vital for your customers to be able to create subscriptions when checking out on your store. You will need to test that you are able to see a subscription created in several different scenarios.

The first scenario is checking out as a guest. Because a customer record in your e-commerce platform is required for recurring orders to work, Subscribe Pro's integration will force a guest to login or register before they can check out with a cart that contains a subscription item. Note that if you are using a third party checkout extension that changes the flow of the checkout steps, the following steps may not line up exactly with what you see. However, the overall idea concept is the same.

  1. Visit your store as a guest.

  2. Add a subscription-eligible product to your guest cart, selecting the Regular Delivery option.

  3. View your cart and ensure that the Regular Delivery option is selected.

  4. Switch back and forth between the One-Time Delivery and Regular Delivery options.

    • Depending on which e-commerce platform you are using, the page may automatically refresh, or you may need to manually select "Update Cart". This is necessary for the subscription option to be saved. After confirming that switching this option works, select the Regular Delivery option and update the cart.

  5. Now click the button to proceed to checkout. It should prompt you to login or register. First, we recommend testing as an entirely new customer, so click Register.

  6. Fill in the necessary details to create your customer record, and then navigate back to the checkout page, if you are not automatically redirected.

  7. Move through checkout as you normally would and place the order.

    • Only the Subscribe Pro Vault Credit Card and (if compatible with your e-commerce platform) Bank Account payment methods should be available during the payment step with a subscription item in your cart.
    • When you create a subscription order with a new card, that card will be saved to your customer record and will be set as the payment method for that subscription, which will be used for recurring orders.
    • You can find a list of test credit card numbers that work with our test gateway here: Test Credit Cards & Payment Testing
    • In Subscribe Pro's Merchant App, navigate to Manage > Subscriptions and find the new subscription you just created. Check that the address, payment profile, and product details came in correctly.

These basic steps will be the same whether you are checking out as a guest or as a registered customer.

We recommend running through these steps multiple times as a logged in customer as well, selecting to use new credit cards in some cases and saved credit cards in other cases.

Step 2 - Modify the Subscription Details

Your customers will be able to modify their subscription details on your store's frontend by visiting their My Account section and clicking My Product Subscriptions on the left hand navigation menu.

We recommend testing each option available, including changing the subscription's Next Order Date, Skipping the Next Delivery, Pausing and reactivating the subscription, updating the delivery address and payment information, changing the quantity and the interval, and finally cancelling the subscription. Note that a cancelled subscription will no longer appear on the My Product Subscriptions page in most of our integrations after you reload the page.

Step 3 - Trigger a Recurring Order

Test orders can be placed using one of two methods: our automatic order processing system and our manual Place Order page. Both of these methods ultimately end up using the same functions in our system to send the order to your e-commerce platform, the difference comes down to how the order gets triggered.

Note

Find out more about:

We recommend using the Place Order page for multiple reasons:

  • Our system includes safeguards that prevents our Automatic Ordering system from sending multiple successful orders for a subscription within one day, making repeated tests more difficult.
  • The customer will receive an email from our Automatic Ordering system if the subscription fails, so when testing a customer's subscription issue, it is better to use the Place Order page until you are confident that the order will succeed on your next attempt.
  • Using the Place Order page you can make "off-cycle" orders without messing with the subscription's next order schedule.