Anybody else not getting orders?

[saucysal]

Our orders have gone extremely quiet, about an eigth of usual number, Wednesday pm, evening and Thursday morning 12 July. The News reports problems with o2 affecting mobile phones. Either an awful lot of people use the o2 network, or there is some other problem. Somebody has reported problems with Barclays Bank systems down yesterday, and another that Top Shop shut as they couldn't process transactions, and some of our suppliers couldn't process purchase orders as their systems are down today. Is anybody on here also experiencing problems? I am concerned that there may be some other problem which I am not aware of and should be dealing with.

Thanks.

Sarah

[saucysal]

So is it just me then?

We haven't even got any orders in Actinic with failed payments, apart from our own test ones. Apparently several banks have/had their systems down yesterday/today, but that would not stop somebody placing an order on our website, just perhaps prevent them paying. The BBC had an outage of its website yesterday evening, nothing to do with o2. In the last 24 hours we have had about a tenth of our usual order level, with no real explanation. Oddly our expenditure on Google Adwords today is as normal, so people are getting online.

Sarah

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Sarah,

The last 3-4 days have been a little bit slower than usual for me but nothing compared to what you're experiencing.

Have you looked at your stats to see what your traffic levels are like compared to the days before this slowdown started?

Mike

[meden]

May not be related but we had no orders whatsoever (unheard of) between 12pm and 10pm on the 12th - we use AP and when I spotted this I tried a dummy order and got the 'could not find server' error page on clicking 'confirm order'. I spoke to Sellerdeck who less than helpfully said their was no problem with AP and basically washed their hands of us.

[saucysal]

Frustrating

It is very frustrating when you know that there must be something wrong somewhere, but you cannot identify what, and nobody else seems to be having the same problem.

In our case, we could place orders ourselves to test that there was nothing wrong on our website or the SagePay/PayPal systems - there was nothing wrong.

We had a further problem on Friday 13 July in that our isp (Eclipse) had changed something which prevented us personally from going onto the Royal Mail's Despatch Manager Online to book our Royal Mail despatches. It made me wonder that if Eclipse could block us from going on to a website, could they also block our customers from going onto our website - hence the lack of orders on 11/12 July?

Things seem to be back to approximately normal now, though orders in general are down; people seem to be away on holiday.

Sarah

[saucysal]

Reply to Mike

The odd thing is that all stats looked fairly normal. We were getting as many hits as normal on Google ads (free listing and Adwords). The stats software that we use also showed fairly typical stats for the 24 hours in question. The website and payment systems were working fine. There were no failed payment orders in Actinic, other than our tests. It would appear to have been just a totally freak 24 hours, perhaps compounded by the o2 problem.

Sarah