Create and Use Sandbox Sites

A sandbox is a cloned site in test mode, holding real copies of your products but using test payment data. Keeping one on hand means you can try a new product or a change to a workflow without touching the site your customers are on.

What a sandbox is for

Sandboxes matter most if you run a single live site, since there's otherwise nowhere safe to experiment. Common reasons to clone a site:

Testing

1. Advanced Billing requires that you test your pricing model before enabling live mode on your site. However, you’ll want to clone your existing live or test site to conduct additional testing as your product offering evolves as a merchant. We refer to these cloned sites as sandboxes.
2. Cloning simplifies moving from test phase to production. Say you have a development site in Advanced Billing with 50 products, a handful of product families, taxes - well, you get the picture; lots of configuration. Eventually everything is correctly set up and tested. You don’t have to go through all of that work again to set up a production site - just clone the dev site!

Product Evolvement

1. You have a set of products that belong to one brand, and you want to sell to another market under a different brand. Clone the site and change only what you need.
2. You have a set of products that you wish to sell in another currency. Clone the whole site then just change the currency.

Site cloning is a great way to speed site creation and reduce errors when migrating. It also lets you keep your existing test site for future testing and debug.

Example:

• You’ve already gone live with your first Advanced Billing Site
• Business is booming!
• You're expanding into Canada and need a new site that uses CAD as its currency
• Clone your existing site, thus creating a sandbox
• Update the pricing, product descriptions, emails, etc. to reflect the CAD currency
• Test your subscriptions in your sandbox CAD site
• Take your CAD site live
• Make a new clone of your CAD site to test new workflows with test credit cards

Additional Examples

A short, nonexhaustive list of what you can accomplish with sandbox sites:

1. Experience Public Signup Pages through your subscriber’s eyes
2. Preview and revise all emails generated for signup, cancellation, transactions
3. Understand the basics of subscription management

Additionally, if you’re integrating with our API, you’ll want a dedicated environment for your developers to use and test the connection to your application.

Sandbox gateway

Within sandbox sites, you’ll be connected initially to the Advanced Billing Test Gateway. The test gateway simulates transactions, so you can vet your pricing model without live credit card data.

As a minimum, Advanced Billing recommends you have 1 live Site and 1 fully functional sandbox environment set up in your account. This way, you'll always have an environment to test workflows and experiment with fake credit card data.

Clone a site

To clone a Site, simply navigate to the top menu and select the site picker. From the site picker, select “Clone Current Site,” as depicted below:

Use the site picker to clone a current site

Advanced Billing then asks which aspects of the current site to clone, and for the new site's subdomain and name.

Cloning does not copy subscriptions, Public Signup Pages, transactions, or existing revenue analytics.

Select which items you'd like to clone

Define whether or not you’d like to clone the following aspects by toggling the on/off selector below the following options:

• Products
• Components
• Coupons
• Custom Fields
• Taxes
• Settings

Offers, Offer Signup Pages, and Public Signup Pages don't carry over to the cloned site.

Once you confirm your options, a notification appears in the original site confirming that cloning has begun.

After a moment, revisit the site picker at the top of the page and locate your new site. If you have many sites in Advanced Billing, you may need to select View All Sites to locate your new site.