Comments on: Sage outage cause customers to lose ‘000s of pounds

By: Terry Froy

Terry Froy — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:13:05 +0000

After reading this article and hearing enough stories from our own customers concerning SagePay, I thought we might give Iridium a go.

Registering for a trial account was very easy and personally, I *love* their API.

Can I get them to acknowledge any of my mails or respond to my requests for a quote to provide a merchant account/payment gateway services ?

I have had *zero* responses from them and our e-mail does work as we host the servers/network that handle it (we are an ISP) – not even a dicky-bird of an automated response – and the annoying thing is that we *can* receive mail from them as I personally received the signup welcome mail and all the trial account details via e-mail.

Terry Froy / Spilsby Internet Solutions

By: DVD

DVD — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:29:59 +0000

This reads to me like a competitor (and non-customer anyway) not wasting an opportunity to have a go at a rival and/or them bigging up a friendly alternative (perhaps for some commercial reason?) which somewhat undermines the argument for me. Yes, any outage is inconvenient and business threatening, however log it is, but Sage’s reasons for bringing the system up slowly carry enough weight with me for me not to go running off to someone else. Having experienced outages and other problems with other service providers as well (PayPal anyone?!), including Google’s recent outages (and look at the size of them!), I think people need to keep this kind of incident in perspective.

As long as SagePay learn the lessons we’ll stick with them rather than jump out of the frying pan.

By: Matt Chatterley

Matt Chatterley — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 06:23:36 +0000

Urgh. Not good at all.

Although, I would normally suggest having a backup payment method available – even if it is an unpopular alternative for one reason or another (on either side of the transaction – e.g. PayPal, et al).

@Martin – You’d like to think any company no matter how big would at least let you know if everything went boom. Obviously this was not the case!

By: Sean Brietsche

Sean Brietsche — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:11:54 +0000

One thing I will say about SagePay/Protx is that when they get it wrong they do it spectacularily. I just cannot fathome how you have a degradedservice for over 24 hours in this day and age. I know a lot of the SagePay staff. I even went sailing with their sales director last summer. Its gutting to see Merchants affected this way.

The scary bit I see on this is we preach to our merchants they should pre-auth transactions and use either in-house fraud rules, either human applied or through technical application, to decide to accept a transaction.

Without the ability to access transactional data that even went through an minute ago I as a
merchant would probably elect to go for a full sale/capture transaction so I don’t lose the sale, ie throw my company fraud rules away for a day so I don’t lose a days sales. This will just mean chargebacks, fraud, and goods shipped where the merchant is going to lose out.

I quote from the SagePay website :

“Our twin data centres and disaster recovery initiatives ensure your payments are being processed all day every day.”

Its easy to say this but in application when a problem does happen the ability to deliver no downtime is not easy. I would be annoyed if Google went down for a couple of hours as its such an important tool in my work day. Not being able to take money for 24 hours as a business is just wrong.

By: Emily Coltman

Emily Coltman — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:37:06 +0000

Yeurgh!

Talk about bad customer service – as you say, it’s one thing to have a short outage – but when the outage lasts that long and they don’t even tell their customers… they don’t deserve to have customers!

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:31:35 +0000

Isn’t it wonderful that I have to find out from your blog that my payment gateway is broken…

*sigh*

By: Александар

Александар — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:21:01 +0000

This is quite funny 🙂

Thanks for the tip about Iridium