WooPayments: Testing and Troubleshooting

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WooPayments includes several tools to help you test things out in your store before taking actual payments. We also have a handy guide to common errors that, although rare, do occur from time to time.

Payment failures (also called “declines”) can happen for a number of reasons. Most often, they occur because the card issuer has declined the charge, or some other system has blocked it. Only rarely do they signify an actual error with WooPayments.

To learn more about why payments might fail, please see this document.

WooPayments is designed to be dependable and broadly compatible with other plugins, but problems can occur in any complex piece of software. Our self-service guide explains how to resolve many common issues.

If need be, you can contact our support staff for assistance. Before doing so, however, it may help to enable logging first, since that is a common step required to diagnose many issues.

By default, WooPayments will place real charges on real payment methods, such as credit and debit cards.

WooPayments also provides an easy-to-enable test mode, which simulates the real payment process as closely as possible. This way, you can try out the various features of WooPayments on your site without charging a live payment method.

Please see our guide to using test mode for instructions on how to enable and use test mode.

If you want to try WooPayments on a site that does not need to process real payments, you can use sandbox mode. This can come in handy on staging sites and the like.

With sandbox mode, it’s possible to create a test account that requires no personal information. This account can then be used to process test transactions. It will only operate in test mode and cannot be used to run any real transactions.

If you’re a WordPress developer or agency working on a site for a client, we have a few helpful guidelines that you may want to consult as well.

Safe mode helps prevent issues in cases where duplicated sites are connected to the same WooPayments account, which may occur when you clone your site to or from a staging site to a live one. Please see guide linked above for tips on what can cause Safe Mode to be triggered, as well as how to address the issue.

Safe mode should almost never be triggered deliberately. Instead, we suggest using sandbox mode on staging sites.

All orders placed in test mode or sandbox mode have the _wcpay_mode meta key set to test. This can help you easily find test/sandbox mode orders and clean up after you’re finished testing WooPayments.

To improve performance, WooPayments caches some information in the WordPress database. On occasion, you may be asked by our support team to clear this cache. To do so:

1. Go to WooCommerce > Status > Tools page.
2. Scroll down to the Clear WooPayments account cache tool.
3. Click Clear.

This tool will clear the cached account details so that they are immediately refreshed from the WooPayments server.