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Payment Gateway: Is Your Shopping Cart Software Breaking Down Without Your Knowledge?

by Michelle Newman     Marissa Chiu, a medical practitioner, wanted to buy an MP3. Since she had a hectic hospital schedule, she decided to buy the gadget online. She browsed many merchant websites using her laptop. Finally, she found the item in one of the site and clicked “ Add To Basket.” Marissa also ordered two more additional items, spare batteries , through the same website. She then proceeded to the virtual check out counter. It was the part where she would have to key in her credit card number. To her surprise, the web page froze. After several minutes of futile attempts, she abandoned her virtual shopping cart in exasperation.     This online incident does not just happen to Marissa.      Several other online shoppers are experiencing the same dismal performance which could be traced to shopping cart glitches.     According to Ecommerce Performance Study by web testing specialist SciVisum, which carried out 24/7 monitoring of the online buying process on UK retail web sites over a period of one month, a number of shopping carts provide online shoppers with unpredictable and unsatisfactory online shopping experience. Moreover, the report showed that 80% of the merchant websites perform inconsistently with widely varying response time, errors and timeouts.     These shopping cart errors prompt online shoppers to abandon their purchases.     Other findings: <ol><li>The testing experts found out that shopping carts involved in the study were out of action below the accepted industry standards. </li><li>1 in 5 shopping carts failed to function for 12 hours in a month </li><li>3 out of 4 failed to meet the standard service level of availability </li><li>1 shopping cart malfunctioned for 4 straight days </li></ol>       If your merchant website experiences the same glitches, then you could be driving away potential customers, and potential revenues away from your online store at an alarming rate. To protect yourself against such unfortunate incidents, experts suggest that you do the following: <ol><li>Periodically review the “ Add to cart” function of your merchant website by stripping any HTTP POST data so that only essential product information are passed along through it. This strategy would keep server load at a minimum and prevent unwanted shopping cart malfunctions. </li><li>Check that your server maintain loads within its designated capacity. Pay special attention to occurrence of database locking flaws by subjecting your server to a rigorous simultaneity testing. </li><li>Always conduct sporadic test with a simulated user load/stress buy to determine your site's shopping cart service availability. </li><li>Regularly monitor your merchant website's performance. </li><li>Last but most important of all, buy your payment gateway and shopping cart software from legitimate and reputable companies-- like www.securepaymentgateways.com-- for dependable product performance and avoid costly errors due to mediocre or substandard software. Michelle Newman is the CEO of a leading Fortune 500 company based in San Francisco. She lectures on various business topics like marketing, competitive business strategies, and management-related issues. Miss Newman serves as business consultant for several payment gateway providers, including <a href="http://www.securepaymentgateways.com/">www.securepaymentgateways.com</a>. She does some business writings on her spare time.)</li></ol><a href="http://www.onlywire.com/submit?u=http://www.securepaymentgateways.com/payment_gateway_is_your_shopping_cart_software_breaking_down_without_your_knowledge.html;t=payment%20gateway;tags=payment%20gateway" target="_blank" title="Add this Article to Onlywire"><img src="http://www.onlywire.com/i/onlywire.ico" alt="" />Add to Onlywire!</a>

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