Introduction

Once you have your order routing finalized, you may want to check to see if your dropship or in-house items are being handled correctly by Onport. In this article, we'll show you how you can raise a test order in BigCommerce without incurring costs.

Import unpaid orders

By default, Onport only imports paid orders. This is so your dropship providers or in-house teams don't ship items not yet paid for. If needed, you can disable this within the order processing tab under the Integrations section:

If you are using a live store, you likely don't want to enable this setting. So, you'll need to create a paid order. To avoid paying for orders at checkout and incurring a charge on your credit card, you can instead create a draft order.

Creating a test order in BigCommerce

To create an order in BigCommerce, you need to do the following:

1. Go to Orders > Add
2. Fill in all the necessary fields:
   
3. Click "Next"
4. Add one or more items from your catalog and choose the variants, if applicable:
   
   
5. Verify the address and shipping method:
   
6. Choose the payment method and add a "fictional" card number and details:
   
   Or you can simply choose "Manual payment":
   
7. The order is now awaiting fulfillment:
   

At this point, you can go to Onport and double-check if everything is routed correctly and working as intended. 

Handling test orders with vendors

In the case that you want to test an order with an existing vendor in Onport, you can do so by placing an order with a dropship provider and seeing if it gets correctly routed to Onport. Do keep in mind that these tests will be reflected in the vendor’s store as real orders, and should therefore be canceled afterwards.

Here are some tips on testing orders with existing vendors:

• Notify your vendors that they will receive orders in their store that shouldn't be shipped.
• You can disable the notifications under dropship provider settings to avoid emails being sent to vendors. Do keep in mind that the orders will still appear in their portal.
• Once you are done, cancel the order. To do this, click into the order, select the line items and click the cancel button.