Forum Moderators: buckworks
Thanks for your time
Chris
Can you set up a second gateway that you can switch to whenever Protx are having problems? Even if it's Paypal it's better than nothing.
In the UK, you have the option of PayPal and NoChex - both of which are free unless you use them. Ideal as backups, but not ideal as your main payment gateway. You will lose more orders, however you will not lose them all unless they are large transactions (under £300ish - I am not sure on the exact amount - under that amount orders do not require a registration for NoChex and they now accept credit cards as well as debit).
I use ProtX VSP Form and have been relatively happy with their service since they upgraded their systems after the last denial of service attack (was it in February?). Before they upgraded there seemed to be quite a bit of down time here and there, but they really seem to have improved since.
I remember looking at the time of the DoS attack for alternative payment gateways - Velocity Pay which has already been mentioned and SecPay, both of which integrate in a similar fashion to ProtX and I believe are UK based companies.
However, I could not find any concrete information or opinion on the reliability of their services, so I decided against the "out of the frying pan" scenario, especially considering the extra effort of integrating with their payment gateways.
SecPay did respond to my request for reliability stats (it took a month, but apparently my email ended up in an unused mailbox). A salesman called and he stated that quite a few customers were abandoning ProtX for them – but he would say that wouldn’t he. I wasn’t really satisfied with their response so decided not to change.
The only other gauge of quality of payment gateways is to scour the web looking for people whining (like us, and rightly so). Not very scientific, I know, but it’s the best I can come up with. Lack of moans about SecPay or Velocity means one of two things – good service or no (vocal) customers.
Regarding the current ProtX situation, I believe it is the result of a botched upgrade. One thing I like about ProtX is their transparency. Their website is constantly updated with the status of their service (check out VSP monitor linked from their home page) and following a bout of downtime they take the time to notify customers of the reasons in quite some technical detail. However, a company upgrading their systems should not put their customers through what I've been through for the past couple of days - maybe they should get some better technical staff. I bet there are some sweaty palms in their office today!
I have had orders over the last two days as the service is intermittent, although I admit we have lost some which is especially frustrating at this time of year. It also must be quite an annoyance to our customers - getting through the entire shopping process only to be denied entering card details won't inspire confidence in us. Luckily we collect the users contact details before we forward to ProtX, so we have been calling the failed orders to convert them. We also have the advantage to a really pleasant customer demographic, which certainly helps.
My advice would be to ride out the current problems – after all it is an “upgrade” so the service should improve eventually. If anyone has a source of reviews or personal experience of other payment gateways, I’d love to hear from them, just like the original poster.
