Testing International Shipping?

[flicman]

So with many thanks to Rob from Lexiconn, I finally got around to setting up USPS shipping on ShoeHardware. It looks great in the Cart nestled in there with my UPS options and everything moves into the checkout screen nicely.

But how do I test it? Is there an established protocol for testing out international shipping charges or am I reduced to shooting e-mails around the globe to friends and acquaintances to get them to try orders that I'll promise to void ASAP?

This seems like a dumb question somehow. I apologize in advance if it is.

[Jim]

What do you want to test? Just add a product of a know weight and size to the cart and enter in a shipping destination to a foreign location and compare the rate you get in ShopSite with the rate you get from the shipping carrier's website. There is no need to finallize the order since the rate is shown on the first shopping cart screen.

[flicman]

I want to test the order all the way through my CC processor to make sure that I'm passing the correct information from Shopsite to the Gateway and that I'm not setting customers up for some un-anticipated error message. That's all. Maybe I'm being paranoid.

[loren_d_c]

You can use the international address as the shipping address and specify a different (your own, for example) address for the billing address.

Note that as far as your credit card processor is concerned, you may have to use a real credit card to test it out (creating a dummy $1 product is usually a good idea in this scenario), unless you can put your payment gateway in Test Mode (some gateways, such as Authorize.net, can do this) in which case a dummy Visa number of 4111 1111 1111 1111 may be accepted by your payment gateway while it's in Test Mode.

-Loren

[flicman]

You can use the international address as the shipping address and specify a different (your own, for example) address for the billing address.

That's what I've done, so I'm at the "hope it works" stage. I find myself here more frequently than I'd like, but it usually works out.

Thanks for your help.