Testing payments before you go live

Test a one-time payment form without charging a card by adding a 100 percent Free coupon, publishing, and submitting with the code.

Your form uses its connected payment account. Maxforms does not provide a customer-facing sandbox switch.

The builder preview disables Submit. Publish the form before testing a submission, and check the displayed amount before authorizing any payment.

Test without charging: a 100%-off coupon#

Use this method only for a one-time payment collected at submission. Free coupons cannot test recurring payments, and recurring checkout also rejects discounts that reduce the amount to zero.

1. In the builder, open your payment field's settings.
2. Under the coupons section, select Add coupon.
3. Enter a Code you'll recognize, such as TEST100.
4. Set Discount type to Free and select Submit.
5. Publish the form.
6. Open the published form, fill it in, select Add discount code, and enter your code.

The total drops to zero and the form submits without asking for a card. Check the saved response and each expected notification separately.

Remove the coupon from the field settings and publish again before sharing the form, or anyone who guesses the code gets it free.

If the coupon does not zero the total, then check the discount type and the code#

• Discount type isn't set to Free. A Percentage coupon set to 100% zeros the item price but not a fee you've added with Enable fee. Only Discount type set to Free zeros both.
• The code doesn't match. Matching ignores case and surrounding spaces, so if the total is still short of zero, the middle of the code itself doesn't match what you set in Code.

Test the real thing: pay and refund yourself#

A Free coupon skips card entry entirely, so it can't prove that charging works. For full confidence:

1. Open your published form and pay a small amount with your own card.
2. Check the submission shows Paid in the Submissions tab.
3. Check the payment appears in your provider's dashboard: the Stripe Dashboard, the Authorize.net Merchant Interface, or the CardPointe portal.
4. Refund yourself from the submission: select Refund, as described in Refunds and disputes.

One thing to know: providers generally keep their processing fee even when a payment is refunded, so a real test payment costs you that fee. A small amount keeps the cost to a few cents.

If you use Services#

If Services is on for your workspace, the same field can also take subscriptions or hold a request for review: see Choose your service setup.

What to check while you're testing#

• The Payment description and amount at checkout read the way you want. That's what respondents see.
• The payment methods you expect show up on the published form. Stripe can offer cards, bank debits, and wallets; Authorize.net and CardPointe take card payments.
• The confirmation respondents see after paying, and the notification you receive, both look right.
• If you use conditional logic around the payment field, submit once down each logic path: a hidden payment field submits without charging, by design (see Why didn't my form charge?).