No orders for 11 Hours!!!!

[tristam]

I have had this before but fortunately not often. On Monday I had 12 orders up to 12.30pm which is about the norm but then went 11 hours with out a sale or even an attempted sale. I checked the site was working ok and that my Adwords were showing. Every thing seemed fine so where were all the shoppers for 11 hours??

[completerookie]

they certainly were not at our sites, there is distinct lack of visitors despite being PR1 for many of our items
perhaps everyone is out watching the "match" being transported all over the UK or anticipating that "extraordinary sight"

[Mike Hughes]

Your site seems Ok and your position in google's serps seems solid.

The only thing you can do is look at your stats and see if the traffic dropped and where it was / wasn't coming from.

If the site had gone down then there'll have been been no visitors from any sources.
If it was just Google rejigging the serps then you should still have had adwords visitors but few from google search.

Mike

[tristam]

We had the average amount of hits organically and via Adwords. I can't get a report of this hourly though.

[Mike Hughes]

It sounds as if something was wrong somewhere.

Say, for example, that you get an average of 1 order per hour with a probability spread as follows:

25% - 0 Orders
50% - 1 order
25% - 2 orders

Then the probably of 0 orders over 11 hours is something like 2 in 10 million. That's around a one in a thousand years probability.

Mike

[tristam]

Thanks for that Mike but I think you might have too much time on your hands to work that one out I don't normally have to wait a thousand years for this but maybe once to twice a month.

I always makes me think that Adwords is moving around a bit but I still see the same.

[Mike Hughes]

Ha yes. My first thoughts were that it might just be chance and that made me wonder what the probability was.

Bsed on the probablity, I'd say it's definitely not just chance but that something else is changing.

As you say though. Other stuff is always changing including short term canges to the serps and adwords.

Your server logs will have all the information you need to see if traffic dropped off and where it was coming from.

You might need a decent stats viewer to look at the details.

Mike

[saucysal]

I always suspect payment problem

When I go an unusually long time with no orders/payments I have learnt from bad experience to suspect a problem with the payment provider. I check to see first if there are a number of orders with failed payments, and check on the payment provider (SagePay) to see what the reasons are. If it says, "A problem occurred at SagePay" then I ring them. This happened on Sunday evening - the problem was HSBC (our bank) who had a UK wide failure at that time. Today I had a run of failed payments, rang SagePay, they said that PayPal had a problem, rang PayPal, they said not. Not quite sure what was happening there. When SagePay had the problem on Sunday, their system monitor made no mention of it.

When there is a payment system outage, I email the customers involved so that they know what is happening. Usually they place the order successfully eventually.

As for people just not even trying to place an order: these ups and downs have always puzzled me, as to why people on mass order or not order. Whether it is the weather (good weather is bad, especially the first good weather of the year), football, whatever.

Sarah

[tristam]

Sarah

We certainly experience this mass buying or not buying but even when the weather has stayed the same. I guess it must be down to witch craft, aliens or something!!

Just wanted to see if anyone else experiences this much.

[chris ashdown]

Data centres do sometimes get cut off from broadband buy damaged cables

[Buzby]

We have been very slow the last few days.

Hopefully this is down to the good weather, it always goes quiet when you get the 1st week of good weather.

[cbarling]

A couple of times we have experienced BT Internet messing up their routing tables and their customers can't see a big proportion of the Internet. It has each time been resolved after half a day or so.

I'm sure other similar things are happening all of the time. Once I was in the US and the bulletin board system I used in the UK couldn't be reached. I did a trace on it and it showed that at one point the IP packets went from A to B, then back to A, back to B etc etc.

Incidentally, as stated on this thread, payment providers going down is another reason for orders disappearing.

Given that Creditcall (the network behind Actinic Payments) has had 99.99% availability since 2005, and the appalling record of some of the competition, and the fact that Actinic Payments provides loads of time saving features, I really don't understand why everyone hasn't switched to Actinic Payments.

Chris

[Paul Bulpit]

A while ago we used to download over 100 orders at 8am on a Monday morning - today we had 20.

[meden]

Our orders are down by two thirds this weekend as well - the ones that have come in were mostly placed in the late evening so we are just putting it down to the weather.

[chickenhouseman]

i think we've suffer from sunny weather too.

But in the past we have had a similar problem when google couldn't find the site - lots of errors in site manager - which was down to a name server error somewhere. This meant that not every google spider could find us and we saw a steady drop in visitors which then corrected it's self. It also meant some pages didn't show but it depended on the country you were in. Luckily the problem was mainly limited to outside the UK so the financial impact wasn't too bad.

As far as i can tell this was a hosting problem, i've had nothing similar since switch my hosting