Here is a open letter to the MD of sagepay copied from the sagepay forum, I thought might be of interest to you all
Quote
Hi Simon,
Firstly congrats on getting the new MySagePay system online reasonably smoothly. However, that’s where the congrats end. I have to say I’ve never known a company have a talent for screwing up with such monumental style with alarming regularity.
Going back, you seem to have at least one disaster a year. This year the MySagePay launch, then the day’s outage in March, last year we had the huge outage in September, 2008 a botched upgrade and of course in 2007 we had the another bundled upgrade which left your customers will no ability to take payments for a whole day.
Thankfully this time it hasn’t left loads of people unable to take payments, although some people have reported issues with the Terminal functionality in MySagePay. It has however lead to major complaints about the design, layout and functionality of the new admin system.
You do seem to have an uncanny knack of failing when it comes to major upgrades. I notice you did ask people to test and give feedback on the new system, using the Test server. There is the first common sense failure. The Test Server. Just how are people supposed to test the functionality of the MySagePay system on the TEST server, where they have little or no data?
Surely the common sense and intelligent thing to do is to create a snapshot of the live data, copy this over to a test server, remove the link to the bank and use that data for customers to play around with the admin system and provide feedback.
That way people can quickly and easily give feedback, using data that they are familiar with.
But then if you ignore the feedback you give, which going on the number of people who have posted that they complained about the iFrame usage, but were ignored as it hasn’t changed in the live version.
Then, the crème-de-la-creme of the upgrade – you remove all the reports from the old system and provide zero reports on the new system. Brilliant. So how are people supposed to know what payments are in which batch? What the totals were for a day, week, month? How are they supposed to do any management reports at all with no reporting functionality?
Or did that omission not get noticed in the exhaustive testing?
The problem is Simon, these problems are bad signs. They are signs of a company who are technically inept. They don’t appear able to plan an upgrade. They don’t seem able to run a testing and feedback system with customers. I and a lot of fellow customers are beginning to wonder if this is the kind of company we want to be partnering with in some cases and in others, a company that we want to rely on for handling payments for our online shops.
There are reasonable frequent settlement delays, outages, glitches (like your SSL certificate over the weekend which lost of my clients a couple of orders). Its simply not good enough.
Then to drop this new Admin system onto us as well, with basically ZERO warning and after apparently hardly any testing by anyone who actually used your old system day-in day-out could well be the final straw.
I have 9 clients with you, £180 a month I pay you on their behalf. I do not pay this money for you to go botching upgrades and causing them problems because of the screw up with the new admin website.
A problem caused to them with their online shop system is a problem for me. I have enough on my plate at the moment without spending time on the phone to them talking them through a shoddy, il-thoughtout, badly designed and temperamental pathetic excuse for an administration website.
Whoever the work experience student was who designed it, I hope you didn’t take them on. I also hope that it was designed by a work experience student because if it wasn’t, you’ve got more serious issues than I thought. There are so many bad design decisions in the admin site that it beggars belief that any professional web designer actually designed this.
• Sideways scrolling
• Ridiculous field ordering on the transactions grid (having to scroll to see any of the fraud indicator fields)
• iFrame usage, basically rendering the back button useless in many cases
and those are just the first 3 that spring to mind. It just shouts of it being designed by someone who doesn’t know what the system is supposed to do.
I seriously suggest, if you haven’t already that you take a good look through this thread (https://support.sagepay.com/forum/Topic11656-26-1.aspx) and do what your customers are asking you to do and rollback the admin system to the old one.
You lost a lot of clients after the last series of outages, if this admin system stays I can see you loosing a hell of a lot more.
If you agree I suggest you indicate below.
Regards
End quote
Quote
Hi Simon,
Firstly congrats on getting the new MySagePay system online reasonably smoothly. However, that’s where the congrats end. I have to say I’ve never known a company have a talent for screwing up with such monumental style with alarming regularity.
Going back, you seem to have at least one disaster a year. This year the MySagePay launch, then the day’s outage in March, last year we had the huge outage in September, 2008 a botched upgrade and of course in 2007 we had the another bundled upgrade which left your customers will no ability to take payments for a whole day.
Thankfully this time it hasn’t left loads of people unable to take payments, although some people have reported issues with the Terminal functionality in MySagePay. It has however lead to major complaints about the design, layout and functionality of the new admin system.
You do seem to have an uncanny knack of failing when it comes to major upgrades. I notice you did ask people to test and give feedback on the new system, using the Test server. There is the first common sense failure. The Test Server. Just how are people supposed to test the functionality of the MySagePay system on the TEST server, where they have little or no data?
Surely the common sense and intelligent thing to do is to create a snapshot of the live data, copy this over to a test server, remove the link to the bank and use that data for customers to play around with the admin system and provide feedback.
That way people can quickly and easily give feedback, using data that they are familiar with.
But then if you ignore the feedback you give, which going on the number of people who have posted that they complained about the iFrame usage, but were ignored as it hasn’t changed in the live version.
Then, the crème-de-la-creme of the upgrade – you remove all the reports from the old system and provide zero reports on the new system. Brilliant. So how are people supposed to know what payments are in which batch? What the totals were for a day, week, month? How are they supposed to do any management reports at all with no reporting functionality?
Or did that omission not get noticed in the exhaustive testing?
The problem is Simon, these problems are bad signs. They are signs of a company who are technically inept. They don’t appear able to plan an upgrade. They don’t seem able to run a testing and feedback system with customers. I and a lot of fellow customers are beginning to wonder if this is the kind of company we want to be partnering with in some cases and in others, a company that we want to rely on for handling payments for our online shops.
There are reasonable frequent settlement delays, outages, glitches (like your SSL certificate over the weekend which lost of my clients a couple of orders). Its simply not good enough.
Then to drop this new Admin system onto us as well, with basically ZERO warning and after apparently hardly any testing by anyone who actually used your old system day-in day-out could well be the final straw.
I have 9 clients with you, £180 a month I pay you on their behalf. I do not pay this money for you to go botching upgrades and causing them problems because of the screw up with the new admin website.
A problem caused to them with their online shop system is a problem for me. I have enough on my plate at the moment without spending time on the phone to them talking them through a shoddy, il-thoughtout, badly designed and temperamental pathetic excuse for an administration website.
Whoever the work experience student was who designed it, I hope you didn’t take them on. I also hope that it was designed by a work experience student because if it wasn’t, you’ve got more serious issues than I thought. There are so many bad design decisions in the admin site that it beggars belief that any professional web designer actually designed this.
• Sideways scrolling
• Ridiculous field ordering on the transactions grid (having to scroll to see any of the fraud indicator fields)
• iFrame usage, basically rendering the back button useless in many cases
and those are just the first 3 that spring to mind. It just shouts of it being designed by someone who doesn’t know what the system is supposed to do.
I seriously suggest, if you haven’t already that you take a good look through this thread (https://support.sagepay.com/forum/Topic11656-26-1.aspx) and do what your customers are asking you to do and rollback the admin system to the old one.
You lost a lot of clients after the last series of outages, if this admin system stays I can see you loosing a hell of a lot more.
If you agree I suggest you indicate below.
Regards
End quote