As there appears to be some major Verified By Visa Issues going on at the moment, I thought I would take this opportunity to tell you a short story and also give you an update on our up and comming Wellbeing store.
Imagine my surprise when we started having issues with our online shop (slimexpress). There was an error in our shopping cart which meant our customers were unable to checkout. As you can imagine that was not good!
With a little investigation the error was found and normal operation was restored… or so we thought. Now there appears to be a larger problem at our online store. The Verified By Visa and MasterCard Secure services are ‘as we speak’ offline. If you don’t know what these services are then let me give you a brief description. When you shop online and enter your debit/credit card details, as a customer, somewhere along the line you will get directed to a service where you have to provide additional security information in order for you to be able to complete your purchase. It’s an additional layer of protection brought in by the banks to ensure you are who you say you are. This additional protection comes in the form of a webpage embedded into the shop owners website. If the Verified By Visa or MasterCard Secure services are offline you get the horrible 404 error message (the page cannot be displayed) and you’re unable to complete your online purchase.
So back to The Wellbeing Store. It’s taken a lot longer than expected to complete our new Wellbeing Store but we assure you it’ll be worth the wait! We’re aiming to open the virtual doors to the new Wellbeing Store in early March (if not sooner) and we can’t wait to get everything up and running with all the new features and changes we have been making. There are two things however we will not be changing – Google Checkout and PayPal Express.
During the downtime to the Verified By Visa and MasterCard Secure services (it’s been two days now from when we noticed) Google Checkout and PayPal Express have been our lifeline. Without these service our customers wouldn’t be able to checkout and therefor make a purchase in our store. Without a doubt these are two payment services we will be bringing over from our existing shop.
Well there you have it, rant over :-). Just when you think things can’t get any worse you can bet your bottom dollar there’s something around the corner waiting to bite you in the backside!
For anyone who is up a certain creek without a paddle because you don’t offer an alternate checkout method I can sympathise with you. We have just experienced what its like to have customers looking around our online shop who can’t checkout. We’re just thanking our lucky stars that this time we have Google Checkout and PayPal Express for backup. We recommend every online shop owner looks at an alternate payment method to ensure this problem doesn’t effect them again.
I may gatecrash Healthy Lifestyles Blog again sometime and go into detail on how to set these service up but for now, I’ll just leave it at that.
Take care.
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Wow! So glad you had backup during these troubles, Larry. Know this will be so helpful to other bloggers who sell products from their site.
Blessings!