Why would you reverse it? If you can’t afford to consume one unit of whatever you are selling are you really in a good place to be in that business?
I guess there can be rare exceptions where the business sell only a handfull of high ticket items. But then again probably Fincantieri does not let you put your bespoke mega yacht on a card through a web transaction.
After some eye-rolling he agreed to buy a burner phone, add a prepay SIM, and whaddayano the bloody charger did not work. Two months later it works, for most people, who have recent cars that are not Teslas. Sigh. "welcome to our product, you're a beta tester. Maybe an alpha tester. We hope it works!".
Test in production. Do real dollar value tests. If you can test with different cards with different security levels, try a Visa 3D Secure and a 2FA Amex charge. Personally I do them and then get reimbursed (or do them directly on a company credit card) rather than start out a production payment history with refunds, not sure if that matters but I figure if it does it's got to be a bad signal so I may as well avoid it.
Why would you not? Stripe still keeps the transaction cost, so clearly they anticipate this happening.
This isn't recommended. Also, presumably by end-to-end you meant post auth business flow too. Such as reconciliation, settlement, generating tax receipts, invoices etc.,
In general, all the data in production should be real, as much as possible.
If the amount is big (e.g., say jewellery story) then figure out a way to recoup/refund the money out of band in a way that leaves no trace in production system. E.g., reimburse it, put it under QA budget or some such.
That's in addition to explaining to our investors that we ended our launch day at -$1,000 due to all the chargeback fees because some dumb developer doesn't know what a testing environment is. And in addition to the fact that Stripe recommends against you testing in that way.
I did get a full end-to-end experience, in my production environment, with literally one variable changed: using the testing Stripe API key instead of the production one.
I don't know, it didn't seem like a crazy way of testing at the time. When you consider that the testing environment worked perfectly, and there was no indication, whatsoever, anywhere that we would not be able to charge cards, it kind of felt like how you're supposed to do it.
But clearly I was wrong :) The way you find out if your account has any issues is by charging a real card, and if it works, reversing it, and if it doesn't work, waiting a couple weeks with no information on what's going on. Lesson learned!