Stripe advises against that (I'm not saying it makes sense)
"Do not use real card details. Testing in live mode using real payment method details is prohibited by the Stripe Services Agreement. Use your test API keys and the card numbers below."
"Do not use real card details. Testing in live mode using real payment method details is prohibited by the Stripe Services Agreement. Use your test API keys and the card numbers below."
They probably mainly just don't want people running shitloads of automated-test charges and issuing refunds for all of them. It may technically be against the TOS but there's no way they actually care if you run the occasional real-credentials test, especially if you don't refund it.
That's the trick. Let Stripe put the money into your bank account and let them think its a real sale (not a production test), then refund the money out of the bank account back to the person who's card was used instead of refunding or reversing the charge. Stripe don't need to know about that.
(You also owe yourself "due diligence" in knowing that you _can_ refund or reverse charges, so you'll also do that test in production as well, but don't make it one of the first transactions you ever do in prod. I try to stretch that test out until after a 60 day window past the first few dozen real sales have gone through, under the assumption that by then Stripe (or whoever) will have seen a bunch of payments go through and not be challenged when the CC statements arrive, and that'll have sent some "probably not a new fraudulent merchant" signals into their systems.)
No need to roll back the transactions directly and risk flagging anything.
Plus, it's often useful having a real, live, paid and in good standing account and/or purchase in the system for further testing steps! (More true in the subscription space than the one-time purchase space... but even there... it's probably worth testing your refund flow end to end periodically eventually, once you have a healthy set of traffic under your belt to avoid standing out.)
Although I guess doing lots of refunds would mess with anti-fraud and other systems.
I just do special pricing/discounts to do a $5 transaction (too small could look like credit card fraud).
Everyone runs 1-3 “real transactions” as a “real customer” when getting ready for a launch with QA.
This cause exists for Stripe to point to for excuses people make when attempting to wash transaction or test stolen CC info in a prod environment (which doesn’t work with a test api key)
There's "testing"
* manual during development
* automated testing
And there's "testing"
* smoke checking processes in production
In most cases, the "test in production" is more of a "validation" that end to end experience works. And there probably shouldn't really be much of a way to distinguish between a "test" in production and a "validation" of the purchase process.