As a store owner or developers, we quite often place test orders on our store to see if things are working fine. Especially, when major modifications/changes are done on the store, just to be sure and have a peace of mind.
What's the usual process we follow when placing a test order?
Randomly pick one of the old stocks or slow-moving products or stuff we are planning to run a campaign on.
And during this process, we forget one small thing i.e we have analytics/ ads tools installs in our store. These tools are constantly monitoring activity on our website and enhancing the ad campaigns or recording data into their databases.
These repeated test orders provide wrong/incorrect data to our analytics and ads tools. Hence, leading to the anomaly in your ads campaigns or analytics reports.
Good practices to follow when placing test orders on your Shopify / E-commerce store
6 Tips to follow when you place Test Order on Shopify Store
1) Create a Test product - The first and important step is to create a test product with a minimum price possible on your store. Also, clearly mention in the description that it's a test product and not for sale. (Sometimes a customer will buy it and ask for delivery. Yes it happens). And once you are done testing remove the product or unpublish it from the online store. If your catalog is on auto sync, unpublish from there as well.
2) Create a discount coupon or Gift card - Use discount code or Gift coupon so that you don't have to pay from your bank accounts.
3) Mention the text "Test" in your order - If there is a note or comment section in your cart add a text "TEST" or anything similar which your team can easily recognize. In checkout fill the customer information section with the word "Test" in most of the fields, especially in the address section. To avoid the logistic team to process the order.
4) Timing for least traffic - If you are making some changes to the UI or carrying out major changes on your store. Publish the changes during the lowest traffic interval usually between 3 A.M. to 5 A.M. Even if a bug is there, very few customers will be affected. And carry out the test order at the same to check if the new flow is correct.
5) Browser extensions / Applications - Activate analytics script blocker extensions like Ghostry in your browser(configure the extension properly).
6) Add IP Filters in Google Analytics - Add a filter excluding the IP address of your house, office or tech / digital marketing agency.
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