How to test cart online without people seeing it

Hi All,
Apologies if this question has already been answered. I'm ready to put my store online and want to test it first before letting the world know about it. I'm going to be using the PayPal sandbox to test customers buying products, etc.
My question is how can I 'hide' the store online so that nobody sees it while it's in the testing phase?
Would love to hear any ideas.
Bearaman

Put an empty (or eg. 'Opening Soon ...') index.html in the root of your shop, then access your shop by using 'www.mydomain.com/index.php'. Works fine provided you don't click the 'Home' link.

If you were "not" using paypal during testing, you could also put the store in "down for maintenance" mode (Admin->Config->Website Maintenance) and set it to only accept your IP address as allowed.

But, since you want to test PayPal transactions and authorizations, you will not be able to do that in maintenance mode.

As a sidenote, after you're done with sandbox testing, you should do some "real" PayPal tests with real accounts outside sandbox to be sure the "live" works. You can refund the transactions and not lose anything.
Note that PayPal's sandbox has historically been less reliable and less accurate than the production system.

Thanks for the help. I may just do as you suggest DrByte and deply in maintence mode and do some testing there. After I go live, I can make some live transactions to make sure the whole thing works.
Thanks,
Bearaman

I think what DrByte was saying was that you can't carry out any Paypal transactions - test or live - while the shop is in maintenance mode.

Pixxi:

I think what DrByte was saying was that you can't carry out any Paypal transactions - test or live - while the shop is in maintenance mode.
Correct.

Granted, you can test everything else in maint mode, and then test PayPal after taking the site off maintenance mode, perhaps during low-traffic hours.