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Web site? What about for processing your online credit card payments? If so, you are probably losing sales that you don't even know about. Sorry, but it's a fact. Third-Party Services Defined. Let me explain what I mean by 'third-party' services. These are the 'link tracking' type of services that one can purchase from various online companies. People use the special html link codes that these services provide to keep track of how visitors move around their Web sites. In return for a monthly fee, the user gets online access to a Web site that stores their link tracking information on a database, and gives them access to tracking statistics. This allows users to quickly and easily find out such things as which links visitors to their Web sites click on, and how often. But, it's not just link tracking services I'm talking about here. Payment processing gateways is another type of third- party service that many of us are dependent upon. These third-party services are great in theory, and when they're working well they're also great in practice. BUT there can be a definite downside to them. That downside is this. If that service company's servers or and/or network go down for any reason, you go down with them! A Case In Point. After a few bad experiences over the past year, I have made it a habit to check all of my Web sites every morning. I quickly open each of the home pages and click on a few key links and make sure they are working as they're supposed to. Of course, I don't have the time to check each and every link, but I do test the key ones I know my visitors tend to click on most often on their way to making a purchase. And, I definitely check the main 'order' links on each page. If I find that these links are not working for some reason, as I have on numerous occasions, it is about the worst thing that could happen. In fact, it could ruin one's whole day, because it means lost sales! Last week while doing one of these routine checks I discovered that a number of links were not working on one of my sites. I did some further checking and realized that these links had not been working for more than 12 hours! What this meant was that visitors to my site had been/were clicking on these links and getting a blank page full of gibberish that indicated that my service provider's data base was corrupted. In effect, this problem was crippling my site. You know what that meant to me of course - lost visitors AND lost sales! Long story, short. It took more than 24 hours from my initial call until the problem was fully resolved. This was during a prime sales period in the middle of the week. Consequently, I estimate that during the 36-hour period that my site was intermittently 'out-of-action' due to this problem, I lost somewhere between 6 and 8 sales. Ouch! I can't afford that. Can you? Here are a couple of other quick examples of similar occurrences that some of you might be able to identify with. Lost Weekend. Lost Sales. One Friday night a few months ago I discovered that the links on two of my sites were not functioning properly. These links were being tracked by one of the 'big name' services that is widely marketed across the Net. Believe it or not, I spent that whole weekend checking my links regularly and then trying to get in touch with this so-called 'service' provider (I use the term 'service' advisedly here). Well, my links didn't work for that entire weekend. At the time, I did some research through my ISP that put me in touch with the gateway site for my service provider. When I contacted the gateway company by telephone, they advised me that my service provider's servers were dropping all connections and nobody there was responding! It just so happens that that particular service provider prominently advertises '24/7' support service in all of their marketing copy! Well, I'm sad to report that not once that weekend did anyone at that company ever respond to one of my many e-mails or phone calls. It appears they all took the weekend off and crossed their fingers that problems wouldn't occur. Unfortunately for their customers, problems did occur. So, effectively, my two sites were shut down for an entire long weekend because of that problem. There went another 5 to 10 sales! To add insult to injury, these people never once contacted me the following week to apologize for the inconvenience and loss of business they might have caused me (as well as to thousands of others, presumably). Lost Weekdays. Lost Sales. A couple of months ago, the links to my 'big name' payment processing company stopped working for an extended period of time. I found out later that they had experienced a major power outage that shut down their entire network. They were out of commission for somewhere between 12 and 20 hours. Apparently, they did not (do not?) have a backup power source in case of such an interruption! Duhhh, this is the year 2002 isn't it? This is a major online payment processor I'm talking about here folks. Shouldn't such back-up be standard for a major payment processor? The implications of this for the small online business person were enormous of course: during that period, literally tens of thousands of dollars in sales were lost by thousands of that service provider's customers! At least three more examples of such shoddy third party service provider incidents that occurred over the past year come to mind as a write this. But alas, I'm out of space. Bottom Line. Don't Accept It. If you use third party services for anything like link tracking or payment processing, don't assume that things are always running along smoothly on 'automatic pilot' as some of the Internet gurus would lead you to believe. Be constantly vigilant, and when you discover a problem, sound the alarm right away, and don't let your 'service' provider off the hook until the problem is fixed. If you get any kind of 'run-around' at all, head for the major message boards and discussion forums. That should get them to take you a bit more seriously in a hurry. Finally, whatever you do, DO NOT accept the type of third party service breakdowns that I describe above. They wouldn't be acceptable in offline business, so why should we accept them online?
Just in time for May, The Cheap Web Hosting Report has a new look based on an open source template by Andreas Viklund. The CWHR staff thinks this is a major improvement and would like to thank Andreas for making this template available to the world. As part of this site revamp, the article library from the Frugal Webmaster Blog has finally been incorporated directly into the Cheap Web Hosting Report web site. There is no longer a jarring design switch when you read articles. The Frugal Webmaster Blog url will soon be pointing to The Cheap Web Hosting Report web site, at least in the short term. We plan to add new articles to the Library... Article Index: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
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