Once you've set up a new discount in the Promotions section, or you’ve requested Ordergroove build out Advanced Promotions of some kind and they’ve told you that it’s ready to test, it's time to go through a dry run to make sure everything works as expected.
Note
Testing your subscription promotions helps you verify that your discounts are applied correctly before customers see them. This is different from A/B testing, which is used to compare multiple promotions and measure their impact on retention.
Setting up the Incentive Test
You’ll want to recreate the exact conditions that were set up within the environment that those changes were made in.
Was this change made in a Production or Development environment?
Depending on your answer, that’s where you’ll need to start. And then work to duplicate the exact conditions for the incentives to be applied.
Was the modification made to one specific offer profile as opposed to program wide?
You’ll need to ensure that you test under that specific profile.
Here are a few common examples of Incentive Setups and how they’d be tested:
| Incentive | Testing Environment |
| My Initial order at checkout should be 20% and the recurring orders should discount 30% | You’ll want to check out from the site in the environment you’re testing and then confirm that order discounts 20% at check out. You’ll then confirm that the Recurring orders that are displayed from the Subscription Manager or Ordergroove CSA Dashboard reflect that 30% discount. |
| The 3rd subscription order for SKU 123 should receive a GWP | You’ll need to create a subscription to SKU 123 and process recurring orders so that you can view the 3rd subscription payload. Either from the Order Logs section of the Dashboard or from your side after the order payload has been sent over. |
| Every 3rd subscription order should discount 20% | You’ll need to create a subscription and then process at least 6 orders so that you can verify that the discount is applied to that nth order number. At least one full rotation should be sufficient to prove the cycle is working. |
| One of my offer profiles should discount recurring orders 20% while another should discount 15% | You’ll need to create a unique subscription under each offer profile to ensure that Offer Profile A applies 20% while Offer Profile B applies 15% |
Testing FAQs
The Offer Profile that I want to test under is not live. How do I create a Subscription if I can’t check out on the site?
From the Data > Customers section of the Dashboard you’ll search for the account you’re testing with. You can then click New under the Subscriptions section of the Customer Account. Select the subscription type (Prepaid or Pay as you go), the Product SKU, Quantity, Frequency, the Offer Type (this is the offer profile that the subscription should exist under. Make sure that this is the offer profile that the incentives you’re testing are tied to), then click Save.
How do I process my test orders?
From within the Subscription manager you can opt to have your order Send Now. You can also do this from the CSA Dashboard within the customer’s account. Once you select this option the order will be queued for placement during the next Order Placement window that your store has. Depending on those settings it could be up to a few minutes or a few hours for that Placement Window to occur.
How do I see what was contained in my test order?
From the Data > Order Logs section of the dashboard you can filter by date, and data point, to view the payload details and even the XML payload that was sent.
I got a processing error on my test order
You can view the error message from the Order Logs Section of the Dashboard by clicking on the Error Icon: