3rd Party Testing for Acquiring Products

The Problem

In the acquiring industry, merchants are the end users and are the ones targeted as beta testers. One of the challenges with using live merchants for beta testers is that while many merchants often want to have access to the newest products and features, they rarely want to invest their time to test and evaluate a product completely or risk any interruption of their business operation. Also, if the product does not perform perfectly, you risk jeopardizing the customer relationship and possibly their on-going business.

Payment Product Beta Testing

Beta testing is one of the most important phases of the software development lifecycle. Beta testing serves multiple purposes, though all of them lead to one thing – a better product launch. Users are now smarter than ever and they know the options they have; if you fail to deliver a good user experience through your software or hardware, they will move on to other competitor products and never come back. In most cases, you never know why they left, they are just gone.

Advantages of User Beta Testing

Beta testing provides product managers and developers with feedback from users’ point of view. Functional testing makes sure all the features of your app are working fine and they would perform as expected. Developers have to maintain the functionality and quality of their app simultaneously as sometimes too much functionality can harm the quality and user experience.

Quality

Quality, performance, stability, security, and reliability are some factors that are achieved by doing beta testing outside of the controller environment of internal QA, by identifying and fixing issues prior to market launch.

Usability

Usability factor has nothing to do with the quality of app because it depends on individual’s preferences and usage. However, the purpose here is to find a balanced and optimal solution that would be suitable for the majority of the target audience. Beta testing provides thorough feedback about the usability and user experience, and based on that feedback developers can improve the app, its features, and design to meet the requirements of the users.

Bug Detection

One of the most obvious and useful advantages of beta testing provides the ability to discover bugs that manifest themselves through the implementation in diverse, real-world environments, that are different than the controlled environment of internal QA.

Verifying New Feature/Functionality

Even if you have done the market research the right way, it is still a theoretical assumption that hasn’t been tested in the real world. Beta testing provides developers a platform to test different features of their apps on a controlled group of users and based on their feedback, you can add, remove or alter different functions. The idea behind this is to reduce the overall deployment costs of the product by introducing optimal features that the target audience likes. Of course, this also helps developers improving the quality of their app.

Independent 3rd Party Testing

3rd Party Beta Testing provides product testing by a company that is contracted by the developer of the product, to perform a detailed review and thorough testing from the user’s perspective. The depth and breadth of testing can differ based on many factors, including what stage the development of the product is in, and the type of product being developed.

Advantages of using a 3rd Party Beta Tester

• You can obtain independent and unbiased feedback on a product prior to releasing to live customers.

• Flexibility – Since 3rd party testers are experienced with payment products, and the dynamics of processing payment transactions with different processors, they know what to look for and can provide detailed and meaningful feedback and test results.

• Less Risk – Using actual customers exclusively for Beta testing requires the product to be fully developed and through multiple rounds of QA. While merchant customers volunteer to beta new products, they are using them in a live environment processing real transactions, so any errors or bugs found can not only have a negative effect on the product beta, they can jeopardize the customer relationship.

• Early-Stage Feedback - Using a 3rd party for beta testing provides the ability to obtain user feedback earlier in the development cycle. When using actual customers for Beta testing, the product generally needs to be out of development and through at least most of the internal QA to ensure there are no known bugs. At this point, any changes to feature and functionality mean a delay in the target release date.

• A Better Customer Beta – By using an independent 3rd Party to perform user testing prior to the customer beta, it helps to prevent customers from finding major bugs or flaws in the product. A successful customer better is important to the product launch, both from an on-time perspective, as well as a marketing perspective. Happy customer betas can be excellent referrals as you launch the product to the wider market.

• Reliable Feedback – By using a contracted 3rd party to perform user testing, you are assured to receive detailed testing results. In addition, since these companies are experienced with payments, and developing payment products, they can provide results and feedback that are meaningful to the product managers and developers.

Disadvantage

• Cost – independent 3rd party beta testing is performed for a fee. While this may appear to be a disadvantage over customers beta testing for free, the reality is that live customer betas do end up costing money. This often is in the form of free or discounted use of the new product in exchange for participating in the beta, or if errors or bugs are found by live beta customers, is can jeopardize your relationship with them, resulting in losing them as a customer.

In most cases, using a 3rd party beta tester prior to releasing to a live customer beta will result in a more successful product, released on schedule.

Conclusion

If your objective is to create the best product you can, then the more ways that you can test the product, and receive user feedback, the better it will be. If your objective is just to get the product out the door quickly, then internal QA and testing may be all you need.

In the acquiring industry, merchants are the end users and are the ones targeted as beta testers. One of the challenges with using live merchants for beta testers is that while many merchants often want to have access to the newest products and features, they rarely want to invest their time and risk any interruption of their business operation, and if the product does not perform perfectly, you risk jeopardizing the customer relationship and possibly their on-going business.

When it comes to product testing, a “fresh pair of eyes” goes a long way to helping uncover defects in functionality. Developers can test but given their close familiarity with the product, they tend to make assumptions or miss things that an end user would not.

Outsourcing for beta testing also gives you the option to only utilize services on an “as needed” basis which has proven to be the most cost-efficient option.

Recommendation

• Leverage 3rd party independent product review and testing for new product initiatives and major releases.

• Initiate 3rd party beta testing as early in the project as possible.

• When using 3rd party developers do not have them perform User Beta Testing.

• The test partner should be a neutral party without a motivation to influence the test results, as may be the case with a contracted developer. Development organizations should do their testing in-house, but they have a vested interest in delivering positive results, so it is best to separate these pieces. This can also be the case with internal development groups.