Internal reference page for SureCart ticket #1540764. Everything below was reproduced and verified on this demo store (SureCart 4.7.3) on 15 September 2026.
Short answer
- There is only one product catalogue. Products and Prices have no live/test flag at all. Only Checkouts, Invoices, Orders, Customers, Purchases, Subscriptions, Payment Intents and Payment Methods are split by mode. So a product can never “belong to the live catalogue” and be invisible to a Test Mode invoice.
- The price was hidden because it was archived. In SureCart, “Archived” and “Not Purchasable” are the same flag, and a price carries its own archived flag separate from the product.
- The invoice product picker filters out archived products and archived prices. Un archiving the product alone is not enough if the price is still archived.
- To get a test mode invoice in WordPress you must use the caret beside Add New on the Invoices screen and pick New Test Invoice. The plain Add New button always makes a live invoice.
- Product status Draft does not matter. A Draft product is selectable in the invoice picker, so the Suite never has to be published.
1. Why the QA price did not appear
Repro product on this store: “Sentinel Ridge Security Operations Suite (Ticket 1540764 Demo)”, licensing on, activation limit 1, one annual subscription price. Set exactly as the customer describes: Archived, Not Purchasable, Draft.
The Pricing box shows “Set up pricing for your product.” as if there were no price at all. The only clue is the small toggle underneath: Show 1 Archived Prices.
Flip that toggle and the price is there, tagged Archived.
Meanwhile, in a Test Mode invoice, Add Product plus a search for “Sentinel” returns Nothing Found, even with the product un archived and Published.
2. The fix
Open the archived price row menu (the three dots) and choose Un-Archive.
The same search in the same Test Mode invoice now returns the price immediately. The product was still Draft at this point, so nothing had to be published.
3. Supported flow for a Test Mode licence, verified end to end
- Product: set Availability to Purchasable and un archive the QA price (Pricing box, “Show N Archived Prices”, three dots, Un-Archive). Leave the Product Page on Draft.
- SureCart, Orders, Invoices. Click the small caret next to Add New and choose New Test Invoice. The new invoice carries a “Test Mode” badge. (The plain Add New button always creates a live invoice, so the caret matters.)
- Add Product, search the Suite, pick the QA price.
- Select a Customer, or create a QA customer inline. Test mode customers are separate from live ones.
- Create Invoice. Turn off “Send an email to the customer” if you do not want the QA address to receive anything.
- Mark the invoice Paid (invoice actions menu). No processor and no card is involved.
- SureCart, Licenses. The licence is there with the activation limit from the product.
- Put the product back to Not Purchasable and re archive the price. The licence keeps working (verified below).
4. What was actually verified
| QA item | Result on this store |
|---|---|
| Licence issued from a test mode invoice | Yes. Licence created with activation limit 1, on a product that was never published. |
| One successful activation | POST /v1/public/activations returned 200 with counted: true. |
| Activation limit 1 enforced | Second activation on a different fingerprint returned 422 activation.exceeds_activation_limit “exceeds the activation limit of 1 for this license”. |
| Deactivation and transfer | DELETE the activation, then activate on a new fingerprint: 200. activations_count back to 1. |
| Protected current release | GET /v1/public/licenses/{key}/expose_current_release with a valid activation_id: 200 plus a short lived signed file URL. Without activation_id: 403 “You must pass a valid activation to expose the current release for this license.” |
| Expiry behaviour | Revoking the purchase flipped the licence to revoked and the release call to 403 “This license has been revoked.” |
| Licence survives re archiving | With the product back to Not Purchasable and the price archived again: licence retrieve 200, release 200, second activation still 422. Nothing breaks. |
5. Three things that will bite the QA plan
a. Staging and local hostnames do not consume the activation limit
SureCart classifies a set of host patterns as development sites. Those activations are recorded with counted: false and are ignored by the limit. Verified live: with the limit already used up, an activation for https://staging.qa-sentinel.com was accepted with counted: false.
Patterns include localhost, 127.0.0.1, the .dev .test .local .staging .example .invalid endings, the dev. local. stage. staging. staging1. test. testing. prefixes, and many managed hosting staging domains (wpengine, kinsta, cloudways, pantheon, flywheel, instawp, tastewp, zipwp and more).
So test “activation limit 1” from ordinary production style hostnames, otherwise the limit will never trip and the test will look broken.
b. Expiry on a subscription price is not cleanly reversible
Revoking the purchase also cancels the subscription behind it. Re invoking the purchase restores the subscription, but on a manually paid test subscription it comes back as past_due, which revokes the purchase again. Verified on this store. Use a throwaway test purchase for the expiry test, or test expiry with “Revoke access after N days” on a one time price instead.
c. The licensing SDK has no offline grace period
The SureCart WordPress licensing SDK calls https://api.surecart.com on every validation. There is no cached verdict and no grace window in the SDK itself. If continuity during a provider outage matters, the vendor plugin has to implement its own tolerance around is_valid() and treat a transport error differently from a “revoked” verdict.
6. Artefacts left on this demo store
Product 21257dcd-0e64-4cbe-aae8-f182462c5b87 Sentinel Ridge Security Operations Suite (Ticket 1540764 Demo)
left ARCHIVED + DRAFT, licensing on, activation limit 1
Price 7817d48c-e367-40c2-b307-588afd59626b QA TEST, Annual Subscription $1/year, left ARCHIVED
Download 8bd48962-4a00-4986-a754-90808a90fb98 set as Current Release
Customer 698cc12d-de52-459b-9c0a-ff8fa5c95632 Sentinel QA Tester, qa.sentinel.1540764@example.com (test mode)
Invoice 1 741a6922-847e-4a76-827c-fa860e64e650 TEST-0131 paid -> licence d3237ef3... now REVOKED (expiry demo)
Invoice 2 22e9f98d-d8ee-4c47-b46c-334028e71066 TEST-0133 paid -> licence e98c1c74-4ffb-4b08-a805-e98ca5144232 ACTIVE 1/1
Public token pt_75QUM1whXf5oKRRk1NfLoKnjRe run the checks yourself:
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer pt_75QUM1whXf5oKRRk1NfLoKnj" \
https://api.surecart.com/v1/public/licenses/e98c1c74-4ffb-4b08-a805-e98ca5144232
# second activation, expect 422 exceeds_activation_limit
curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer pt_75QUM1whXf5oKRRk1NfLoKnj" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"activation":{"fingerprint":"https://qa-sentinel-two.com","name":"QA Two","license":"bf885405-9d41-473e-ad4a-6f720c91f015"}}' \
https://api.surecart.com/v1/public/activationsAdmin links: Licenses · Invoices · The repro product
7. Source of truth
- Picker query and filters:
packages/admin/invoices/modules/NewPrice.js(sendsarchived: false),packages/admin/components/PriceSelector.js,packages/admin/components/SelectPrice.js(drops every price whereprice.archivedis true). - Archived equals Not Purchasable:
packages/admin/products/components/Availability/index.js. - Archived prices hidden behind the toggle:
packages/admin/products/hooks/useSelectPrices.jsandpackages/admin/products/modules/Prices/ShowArchivedToggle.js. - No live/test flag on Product or Price: only
checkout, customer, invoice, order, payment_intent, payment_method, payout, payout_group, processor, processor_invitation, purchase, referral, shipment, shipping_provider, subscription, subscription_eventincludeLiveModeModelConcernon the platform. - Development host patterns:
config/activation_not_counted_host_patterns.ymlon the platform. - Docs: API reference, “Live & Test Mode”.
