Is your store ready for its first real payment? A pre-flight checklist

You spent two weeks getting everything ready. The website looks perfect. Products are uploaded. You told your friends. You posted on Instagram. And then your first real customer tries to pay — and gets an error.

You refresh. You try again. Nothing. The customer is gone. Your first sale just evaporated.

This happens more often than anyone admits. Not because the technology is broken, but because somewhere between "it works in test mode" and "it works for real," something got left behind. Like packing for a trip and realising at the airport that your passport is on the kitchen table.

Here's your pre-flight checklist. Print it. Tape it to your monitor. Check every item before you announce your store to the world.

The boarding pass: live credentials

Here's a story we hear every month: "Everything worked perfectly in testing! But now real customers get errors."

The reason is almost always the same. The store is still using test API keys instead of live ones. It's like showing up at the gate with yesterday's boarding pass — the format is right, but it won't get you on the plane.

Test mode is a sandbox. Payments look real, but no money moves. When you switch to live mode, you need a different set of credentials — your live Platform ID and API key.

The check: Log into your Polako Finance dashboard. Go to API credentials. Are you using the live keys, not the test ones? Copy-paste errors are the number one cause of launch-day failures.

The hotel reservation: your webhook URL

When a customer pays on your site, how does your store know the payment succeeded? Through a webhook — a message our system sends to your server saying "hey, order #1234 was paid."

If that message goes to the wrong address — like a hotel confirmation email that goes to your spam folder — your store never finds out the payment worked. The customer paid, but their order stays at "pending." They email you. You check manually. Chaos.

The check: The webhook URL in your dashboard should point to your live website, not localhost, not your staging server, not the old domain you used during development. Test it: make a small purchase and see if the order status updates automatically.

The phone charger: mobile checkout

You tested your store on your laptop, in your office, on fast WiFi. It looked great.

But 70% of your customers will see it on a phone, on mobile data, probably while doing three other things. If your checkout takes 5 seconds to load or the "pay" button is off-screen, they won't wait. They'll close the tab and forget you exist.

The check: Take out your phone. Open your store over mobile data (turn off WiFi). Add something to cart. Go through the entire checkout. Time it. If it takes more than 10 seconds from "add to cart" to "payment page" — something needs fixing.

Also: try it on an old phone. Not everyone has the latest model. Your most price-sensitive customers — the ones who comparison-shop — probably have a phone that's three years old.

The travel insurance: return policy

Nobody likes thinking about returns. It feels like planning for failure before you've even started. But here's the thing: a visible return policy increases purchases, not returns.

Serbian law gives online buyers 14 days to return products without giving a reason. This applies whether you have a policy or not — the law doesn't care. But if you don't have a clear policy on your site:

• Customers hesitate because they don't know what happens if the product isn't right
• When someone does want a return, you have no process — it becomes a phone call and an argument
• Frustrated customers go to their bank and file a chargeback instead of contacting you

The check: Can a customer find your return policy within two clicks from any page? Is it linked from the checkout page? Does it clearly state: return window, how to initiate a return, who pays for shipping, and when they get their money back?

The weather forecast: test a real payment

This sounds obvious. It isn't.

Many store owners launch without ever making a single real purchase on their own site. They tested in sandbox mode, where everything always works. But real payments involve real banks, real 3D Secure, and real network conditions.

The check: Before announcing your store, buy something from it. Use a real card. Go through the entire flow: add to cart, fill in your details, pay, see the confirmation, check that you received the order email, verify the fiscal receipt, and confirm the money appeared in your account. If any step fails — you found it before your customers did.

The carry-on limit: one page of settings

We could add twenty more items to this checklist. Currency settings, tax configuration, shipping zones, email templates, social media pixels, cookie consent banners.

But here's the truth: if you nail the six items above, you're ahead of most new online stores in Serbia. We've seen beautiful stores fail because of a wrong API key. We've seen ugly stores succeed because the checkout worked flawlessly on every phone.

Get the basics right. The rest can wait until your second sale.

Your pre-flight checklist

• Live credentials — production API keys, not test
• Webhook URL — points to your live site
• Mobile checkout — tested on a phone over mobile data
• Return policy — visible, linked from checkout
• Real purchase — you bought something from your own store and it worked end-to-end