Testing Your Checkout

Before your event goes on sale, it’s worth running through the checkout yourself — checking the flow, the questions, and the confirmation emails exactly as an attendee will experience them.

The Recommended Approach

Create a free ticket and buy it:

1. Go to Tickets & Products and create a ticket with the Free price type — name it something obvious like “Test Ticket”
2. Keep the event in Draft — while you’re logged in, you can open the event page and complete checkout even though the public can’t see it
3. Open your event page — click Preview Event page while managing the event — and purchase the free ticket as an attendee would
4. Check the full experience: ticket selection, registration questions, the confirmation page, the order confirmation email, and the ticket email — the email itself carries the ticket details, a calendar attachment and a View Ticket button; the QR code is on the ticket page it links to (and on the print view)

Because the ticket is free, no payment is processed and nothing goes through Stripe — but everything else behaves exactly like a real order, so you can also test check-in by scanning your own test ticket.

If you specifically want to test paid checkout, remember that a real card payment will be charged and Stripe fees may apply even after a refund. For most purposes, a free test order tells you everything you need.

Cleaning Up Test Orders

When you’re done testing, you have two options:

• Cancel the test order — open the order in Orders, and cancel it. This cancels the tickets and attendees; the cancelled order remains visible in your order list for record-keeping.
• Duplicate the event and start fresh — if you’d rather have a completely clean slate (no test orders in your lists or reports), duplicate the event and use the copy as your live event. Orders and attendees are never copied, so the duplicate starts with zero sales data. Tick the items you want cloned (tickets, questions, settings, promo codes and so on) — and note the duplicate is always created as a Draft, so you’ll need to publish it when you’re ready to go live.

Don’t forget to hide the test ticket itself before going on sale — a ticket can’t be deleted once it has orders, but hiding removes it from the event page.

Tips

• If you use registration questions, fill them in as a real attendee would to check wording and required fields
• Testing the widget embed? Do a test purchase through your own website too — but a draft event only checks out while you’re signed in to Hi.Events in the same browser. Visited logged out, the embedded widget will report “This event is not live”, so either stay signed in or publish the event first.