128bit SSL Certs and eCommerce

How many have trouble with 128bit SSL Certs

[Ledfish]

We recently made some major changes to our ecommerce site, one of them was getting our own SSL certificate. We purchased and premium ssl certificate from comodo. Sinc we put it in place tho, we have been getting a few complaints from people trying to place orders and having the site basically crash on them. We were able to determine that this was because they had a browser that was only set to handle 56 bit encryption. Of Course you can easily upgrade them to 128 encryption.

But I was wondering if other have experienced this problem and what did you do about it?

[DaveN]

we have about 20 SSL cert a few from comodo, and never had a problem with endusers.

had a problem with another SSL provider when passing from our HTTPS to a clearing houses HTTPS, but that was 512bit to 1024 which cause the problem.

DaveN

[Midas67]

I have had the same sort of problem many times particularly where IE6 says you are entering a non-secure site in spite of the fact that it is a https page with no off site links on it. I hate to think of the number of buyers who have simply gone away at that point. My hosting service has never had an answer as to why this is happening.

[wackal]

is it that message that says the page has both secure and non-secure info?

[Nermin]

Midas67
check for images. make sure that images are in "secure" part as well. i see allot of people make everything secure and pull images from non-secure part of the website.

Ledfish
i never had any problems with ssl certificates. actually just finished 20 page project in schoop on ssl :)
check your logs and see what browsers you getting to visit your website, that will give you good idea

Nermin

[martyt]

The only SSL-related problem we ever had (or at least, that I heard from a customer about) was the second person who wanted to place an order after we opened!

It was some woman using WebTV of all things -- she couldn't get to the secure checkout on our web site. Once I investigated, it turned out that WebTV software didn't recognize the root certificate authority for GeoTrust secure certificates. At the time (about 9 months ago) it was a known problem with WebTV and had been for over a year.

[Ledfish]

Thanks gang for sharing your experiences.

Just to comfirm, the error message that someone mentioned is because something is linked or pulled from http:// rather than [,...] investigate the page, you'll find it somewhere and it's really rather easy to solve.

In my own logs, I have about 60% on IE6, 20% on IE5.5 and the remaining 20% are using various other browsers. What concerned me is that rather than upgrading, most just departed and never returned even though we provided them with easy access to all the places they gcould get upgrades for there browser (BTW it on takes about 2 minutes of a 56k modem)

Anyhow, thanks again for the information everyone.

[martyt]

Curious how you detect the SSL failure in your server logs? Is there a specific HTTP error that gets returned when the SSL cert requires 128 bit encryption but the client doesn't support it?

[Ledfish]

martyt

At first it wasn't easy to see in the logs, in the end we found it by being able to track a specific user who had a problem and referencing their movement through our pages. There was a weird error number in the 500 series, but I can't remember it off the top of my head. I do remember that it only occurred once each time this happened and since it only happened once or twice a day, it just didn't jump out to us when doing log analysis.