Sandbox Environment

What it is for

Once your marketplace is live, every change you make is made in front of real buyers and sellers. A sandbox gives you a place to try things first:

• Add a seller plan or change a price and walk through the subscription checkout with a test card.
• Show a new dealer or a colleague what buying and selling looks like without touching the live store.
• Try a new listing type, a signup-form change, a shipping rule or a terminology change before you make it for real.
• Test a feature from a Friday release before you switch it on for your users.

What gets copied

So the copy is not empty, the sandbox is seeded with a sample seller and a few sample listings modelled on your own (same titles, prices and photos), plus one sample order or booking. Create your own test buyer and seller accounts from the sandbox's sign-up page like any visitor would.

Test accounts

Sign-in links are emails, and the sandbox only delivers email to the address you and your team members log in to Prometora with. Other addresses you own do not count, even on the same domain. A sign-up with any other address gets no email and the account is removed again. You have two ways to get as many test accounts as you like:

• Plus-tags on your Prometora login address. If you log in as [email protected], sign up as [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and so on. Gmail, Outlook, iCloud and most providers deliver all of them to [email protected], and the sandbox treats them as yours. Each one is a separate account.
• Log in as. Any account in the sandbox, including the sample seller and accounts with made-up addresses, can be opened from Store Settings → Sellers or Buyers with Log in as. On a live store that session cannot pay or connect Stripe; in the sandbox it can, so you can walk a test buyer through checkout without an inbox at all.

Inviting a colleague as a team member also works, but only once they have accepted and have a Prometora account. The two options above are quicker.

Stripe in the sandbox

When you save a test secret key, your seller plans and VAT rate are re-created on that key automatically, so plan checkout works straight away. For Stripe Connect, click Set up webhook for me in the sandbox's Payments tab once; it creates the test-mode webhook for you. Seller subscriptions still need a webhook: register the sandbox store's webhook URL in your Stripe sandbox and paste the signing secret, exactly as described on the Subscriptions page. Use Stripe's test card 4242 4242 4242 4242.

Shipping labels start in sandbox mode on Shipmondo, DPD and Canada Post, and the carrier credentials are not copied from your live store. To see the real label flow (for example the dao code a seller writes on the parcel), enter your live carrier credentials in the sandbox's Shipping tab and turn sandbox mode off. Labels are then real bookings paid from your carrier balance, so cancel each test shipment with the carrier afterwards (a dao label booked via Shipmondo can be cancelled there before the first scan). The emails with the label or code only reach you and your team, like every other sandbox email. ShipStation has no test mode, so the sandbox refuses ShipStation labels: test those on your live store with an order to yourself and void the label in ShipStation.

Emails from the sandbox

Who can see it

Reset and delete

Moving a change to live

Before you launch

Test payments in a sandbox, not on your real store. Stripe test keys, test sellers and test orders all belong in the sandbox; the real store only ever gets your live keys. The reason: a seller who connects Stripe while test keys are in gets a test-mode Stripe account, and that account does not exist once you switch to live keys. Prometora removes those test connections when you save your live keys, and each of those sellers has to set up payouts again. Testing in the sandbox keeps your real sellers out of that.

1. Create the sandbox from your store card on the dashboard. It copies your current settings.
2. Paste Stripe test keys under the sandbox's Store Settings → Payment. Seller plans and your VAT rate are re-created on that key automatically.
3. Create a seller account and a buyer account on the sandbox with plus-tags on your own address (you+seller@, you+buyer@) and walk through listing, checkout and payout with Stripe's test card 4242 4242 4242 4242.
4. Paste your live keys on the real store's Payment tab, then share the address. Nothing from the sandbox carries over, so there is nothing to clean up.

The launch checklist follows the same rule: the payments step only counts as done with live keys. With test keys saved on the real store it stays open and points you here.

Good to know