Ordering from your own live store is the fastest way to check that checkout, shipping rates, payment and notifications all behave. Two things catch merchants out when they do it: keeping those orders out of their real numbers, and the limit that stops them after a few attempts. This article covers both.
Marking an order as a test
Type the single word test into one of the checkout fields listed below and the order is flagged as a test the moment it is placed. There is no setting to switch on beforehand: the flag comes from what was typed in the form.
The field has to contain exactly test and nothing else. Capitals do not matter and spaces around the word are trimmed, so Test and TEST both work, while test order, test1 and my test do not. Every other field can hold whatever you like.
These are the fields that are checked:
- Full name, first name, last name
- Company
- Address line 1, address line 2
- City, commune, province, state or region
- Postal code, national ID
- Order note
Phone number and email address are not checked, so the word has no effect there. Neither are neighborhood, district, apartment and floor. Use a field your checkout form actually shows: fields you turned off in your checkout settings are ignored.
Once placed, the order carries a Test tag on the orders list and in the order detail, so nobody on your team fulfills it by mistake.
What a test order skips
- It never counts toward the order limit described below, so you can place as many as you need.
- It costs you nothing: no order fee is taken from your wallet and it does not use up an order from your plan.
- It is left out of the Excel export.
- The Automator app ignores it, and no status-change events are sent for it.
What a test order does not skip
A test order is still a real row in your store, so until you delete it:
- It counts in the order and revenue totals on your Dashboard and Statistics pages.
- Webhooks, the Google Sheets app and the Conversion API apps still fire for it, with a test flag in the payload, and the ad pixels on your thanks page fire like any other purchase. The Conversion API apps have their own test mode you can switch on beforehand. Browser pixels do not have one.
- Your normal new-order notifications still reach you.
Delete your test orders when you are done and those totals go back to normal. Deleting a test order is immediate and permanent: unlike a real order it is not kept for two months and it never shows up in the recovery panel. See How do I recover a deleted order or an abandoned cart?.
A test order still ticks the Place a test order task in the Dashboard setup panel, so you do not need to leave a real order behind just to complete it.
Why you cannot place more orders
To stop bots and fake cash-on-delivery floods, a store accepts a limited number of orders from the same buyer in a short window. When you go over it, the checkout answers with:
"You have placed several orders recently. Please wait a few hours before trying again"
The limit is 3 orders by default. If you installed the Shield app and enabled Max orders per customer, your own value is used instead, and that field only accepts 1 to 3, so 3 is the highest the platform allows. There is no way to raise it further.
Four separate counts are made, each covering the last 24 hours, and hitting any one of them blocks the order:
- Per browser: orders confirmed from this browser, tracked with a cookie.
- Per customer: orders tied to this visitor's session.
- Per device: orders from this device. This one survives clearing your cookies, because the device is remembered separately.
- Per connection: how many different buyers ordered from this internet connection, allowing 5 on a recognised local network or 3 when the store set its own limit or the connection is a VPN or data centre.
Abandoned orders, deleted orders and test orders are excluded from all four counts. The last count is about separate people rather than about you, so ordering repeatedly yourself never adds to it.
You got a confirmation page but no order arrived
If the Shield app's Decoy mode is enabled, blocked orders are not answered with an error at all. The visitor is sent to a normal thanks page and gets a convincing fake confirmation, while no order is written. That is deliberate: it keeps attackers busy re-trying. When you test your own store with Decoy mode on and the order never appears in your orders list, you have almost certainly hit the limit above.
How to get unblocked
- Use test orders from now on. Put
testin one of the fields listed at the top of this article. Test orders never build up toward the limit, so this prevents the next block rather than lifting the one you are facing now. - Delete the orders you already placed. Open Orders, select the orders you placed while testing and delete them. Deleted orders drop out of the counts straight away, and real ones stay recoverable for two months.
- Wait it out. Every count clears 24 hours after the order that filled it.
- Change device and network together. Another phone on mobile data rather than your office Wi-Fi gives you a fresh session and a fresh IP address.
Does this affect my customers?
The rule applies to every buyer, not just to you, but a genuine shopper almost never trips it: it takes 3 confirmed orders from the same person, browser or device within 24 hours, or 5 different buyers on one internet connection. In practice the only people who reach it are merchants testing their own store and bots placing fake orders, which is exactly the point. If you sell products people reorder several times a day, install Shield and review Max orders per customer together with the rest of your anti-fraud setup in How do I block fraud and bots with the Shield app?.