Before you take real money, watch the whole thing work from beginning to end. Test mode lets you do that with nothing at stake.
What test mode does
Everything behaves exactly as it will in real life. The checkout appears, the payment screen opens, the plugin processes the result, the emails go out, the package activates, and the transaction lands in your admin.
The only difference is that no money moves.
Step 1: Check you are in test mode
In the plugin, open the API keys tab. Your Test API key should be filled in, and Active mode should be set to TEST.
At the top of the plugin you should see a TEST badge. As long as that badge is showing, nothing real is being charged.
Step 2: Go shopping on your own website
Open your own website as if you were a customer. Use a private or incognito browser window, so you are logged out and you see exactly what a real visitor sees. This matters, because being logged in as an administrator hides some of the problems you are trying to find.
Choose a membership package, or submit a property that requires payment, and carry on to the checkout.
Step 3: Check that Mollie is there
At the payment step you should see Mollie, offering the methods you switched on.
If Mollie is not there, stop. Do not try to work around it. Go back to the previous article, because it is almost certainly one of these three: Enable Paid Submission is still set to No, the gateway type is set to WooCommerce, or no method is switched on in the plugin or in your Mollie account.
If you see two or three payment blocks stacked up, then Stripe, PayPal or Wire Transfer is still switched on in Houzez. Step 5 of the previous article turns them off, and it is worth doing properly.
Step 4: Pay
Choose a method, for example iDEAL.
Mollie shows you a test payment screen where you get to pick the outcome yourself: paid, failed, expired, cancelled. Choose Paid.
Step 5: Check what happened
Within seconds, all of this should have happened without you lifting a finger.
You land back on your website and see a confirmation.
The package is active on the account you used.
A confirmation email arrives, with the invoice.
In the plugin, on the Transactions tab, the payment is listed as paid.
On the Analytics tab, your first data point appears.
If all of that happened, your setup works. That really is the whole thing.
When something did not happen
You saw “Access denied” while registering. Two settings are off. Go back to step 8 of the previous article.
Mollie did not appear at checkout. See step 3 above.
The payment succeeded, but the package was not activated. This is nearly always the webhook. Mollie could not reach your website to report the result. Go to the API keys tab and click Test webhook. If it fails, something is blocking Mollie: a firewall, a security plugin, a maintenance page, or a password-protected site.
You got two confirmation emails. That is not a bug. Houzez sends its own emails as well as ours. You will find Houzez’s under Houzez, Theme Options, Email Management (look for “Package Activated” and “Purchase Activated”), and ours under Mollie Payments, Email management. Switch off whichever set you do not want. Most people keep ours, because they can be styled and they include the invoice.
No email arrived at all. Check your spam folder first. If it is really missing, the cause is usually WordPress itself, which is famously bad at sending email. An SMTP plugin fixes this permanently, and it is worth doing regardless.
Nothing happened at all. Open the System tab in the plugin. It runs a set of checks on your whole setup and tells you plainly what is wrong. It is the fastest way to find out what we would ask you anyway.
Clean up your test data
Test payments show up in your transactions and your analytics, and you do not want them polluting your real figures.
On the Analytics tab there is an option to reset your test data. It clears the test transactions and leaves your live data alone.
Do it once you are happy, so your real bookkeeping starts from zero.
What happens next
It works. Time to go live.