1Shoppingcart Was Down All Day Yesterday
Monday, 12:14 PM
Dear Friend,
Have you ever checked out 1shoppingcart.com?
It may not be the best solution for everybody… but it works well, has some very useful features and they have good customer service, too.
I have a few 1shop accounts I use for several different niche businesses.
Yesterday was a bit frustrating because 1shoppingcart was down all day. Customers were unable to place orders with merchants using 1shop… and merchants couldn't log into the system.
I wrote their tech support people yesterday about this and received this response this morning:
Dear Dan,
We understand that the problems affecting our system this weekend have affected your business. We feel that this is unacceptable and regret that we could not prevent this situation from occurring.
The problem we have had is not the result of an attack on our system.
At approximately 12:34PM EST our Emergency Response Team began receiving alerts concerning performance problems on our core systems. At this time they immediately responded to the incident and began troubleshooting and formulating a plan to recover service as quickly as possible. Our Team executed this recovery plan in an effort to resolve the issues that were caused by a suspected major hardware failure within our core systems.
The recovery plan procedure took several hours to complete after which we began working through a test plan to ensure system stability. At approximately 11:32PM EST our test plan was complete and the system was brought back online.
Pending a full in-depth analysis of this weekend’s events some features will be temporarily unavailable within our email system. This includes Broadcasts, Autoresponders, order notifications as well as some other minor notifications sent via email by the system. We expect to have these features 100% restored by Monday, October 4th, 2010.
Please accept our sincerest apologies.
Regards,
Patrick
Technical Support
So… for 11 hours, nobody could order anything from either of my 3 different businesses that use 1shoppingcart.
Now Sunday is usually a slow day for sales (thank goodness it didn't happen on a weekday)… but the best I can figure, in one of these three businesses, this little 1shop glitch cost me at LEAST $1,500 in lost sales yesterday. Probably more because I had sent an e-mail promotion Sunday morning… and nobody could order from it.
I completely understand glitches outside of anybody's control like this happen occasionally… so I'm not mad at 1shoppingcart. Technology doesn't always work right.
Interesting timing for this little glitch though, considering the You Screwed Up… Now What? post I published just a couple days ago.
I think it will be interesting is to watch their response.
Since one of my accounts is one of their bigger players, spending several thousand a year in fees with them, I'm curious if the e-mail apology is their only customer service action.
Or are they going to offer some kind of discount?
Or maybe waive my fees for a month to help make up for that $1,500+ in lost sales I'll probably never recoup? (After all, any good salesman will tell you… if you don't close the deal while a prospect is in heat, they're probably gone forever.)
Either way, I'm not going to jump on the "bash 1shoppingcart" bandwagon.
I'm simply just going to watch their response with great interest.
Was anybody else affected by this 1shoppingcart glitch yesterday?
All the best,
P.S. This is one of many reasons why marketers who rely ONLY on the Internet are screwed. Especially with all the other viruses, attacks and "bugs" that can shut your business down in a heartbeat without you realizing it.
Lucikly, knowing what I know… I can send all my customers a specially formatted direct mail letter with a nice excuse to give them a sale and make even MORE fungolas than I would have, had the shopping cart been working all weekend.
I'll show you how I do this sort of thing on my free tele-seminar. Click here now to register your spot.
I've thought several times their system was down or whatever based on traffic vs. conversion that is the norm for me.
They swear nothing was wrong.
Wonder if we can get a monitoring service that will monitor their downtime like you can buy for a regular website…
I encourage you to follow up if they leave it to a simple apology email.
When my hosting company went down and all my sites were intermittently offline for several days, I also got the 'apology' email from CS, but I wouldn't leave it at that – especially since the problem wasn't getting resolved.
So I got on the horn with one of the executives. When this executive noticed how many domains I buy on a regular basis, I was compensated with gratis premium hosting —— For Life.
Nothing like putting your eggs in one basket….
Always have a backup processor that you can turn on in a pinch, or better yet have it enabled automatically… That's what I have set up…
Same goes for your optin's too…
I never try to rely on any 3rd party service… At any time they can inturpt your business and cost you $.
It's funny, I was going to email you my suggestion for a new shopping cart after I used 1shopcart for years, had problems, and noticed you were using them. After their systems being down several times as well as poor functionality I switched carts. And I'll never go back to 1shop cart. The new cart I use is ultracart. They are totally customizable and have free, unlimited upsells. Their monthly fee is more than 1shopcart but I find ultracart doesn't nickle-and-dime you so it's cheaper in the end. Not to mention a more robust merchant account solution (rotating merchant accounts!). It's a little bit of a pain to get it setup at first but sooo worth it. Anyway, best of luck with your problem. And check out other solutions out there. I'm glad I did.
Hi Dan,
My issue with 1SC is not just that they had a major system outage that last Saturday, Sunday and into Monday. My issue with them is that they are trying to hide the outage from their customers. That is unethical.
I too have used 1SC for almost 8 years now. In that time they have never had a problem putting up a pop-up message upon login that the company was closing early. Or that they were closing down for a company meeting or closed for holiday hours.
But when I logged in this morning, there was nothing – no mention of a system outage at all. Even though broadcasts and ARs were still not working.
So I head to Twitter where they were posting updates last night as late as midnight and low and behold, they've deleted many of the Tweets from Sat and Sun and left the ones that said "The system is 100% fine" (dated 17 hours prior).
Which was not true. The deleted the messages about "we're working on it as fast as we can" "broadcasts and ARs will be working on Monday" " this is not a data breech" etc. … All of those were GONE at 4:39 am Pacific Time.
We launched a big holiday promotion over the weekend and with the lost sales and extra customer service staff it cost us thousands of dollars.
My experience has been that never once has 1SC credited a customer's account for an outage.
So in my opinion there are a lot more issues here than only the actual down time.
-Lisa
Dan,
I would assume there was some of the standard language in 1shoppingcart's terms of service, or whatever they call theirs, saying you indemnify them for any loss of business due to things beyond their control. So they're covered. I had a hosting company screw me over and shut down my site based on a misunderstanding and they wouldn't do a thing. I had to quickly change hosts.
I like your idea of a new/repeat mailing, maybe offering a little discount to make up for the inconvenience. That might get the fence-sitters to commit.
Just don't make it sound like all the "gooroos" who send out a followup saying the response to their offer was so great it crashed their server and people couldn't order so they're extending their offer. Those crack me up! If they told the truth, they'd be saying: "The response wasn't as good as I expected so I'm extending the offer in hopes of making some money."
Owen
i like 1sc…. its better than most of the stuff out there off the shelf, but man…. their system is still stuck in 2005…. no subid tracking, their email delivery is shoddy (just got 23% bounce rate on a broadcast) and their ad tracking platform is horrible….
plus they're charging now for phone support!
I wouldn't use 1ShoppingCart, personally. I've seen a lot of people having problems with it in the past. Where the technology is at, there are plenty of other solutions available these days.
i like 1sc…. its better than most of the stuff out there off the shelf, but man they're stuck in 2005…. their ad tracking platform is really bad…. their affiliate system still doesn't have subid tracking…. you can't split test using Google Website Optmizer using their new upsell express system…. and their email deverability is HORRIBLE (getting 24% bounces)
Hey Dan,
Just thought I'd chime in regarding your "I'm surprised at the response" e-mail sent today 10-5-10 where you mention a low comment rate and drew a conclusion as to why the comments were so low relative to mailing this list on Mon. as opposed to Tue.
While that may be true, many of us that read your blog and normally comment may have kept quiet yesterday because like myself, they didn't have a horse in that race (1 shoppingcart) so to speak.
Since you closed your post with a situation specific question – "Was anybody else affected by this 1shoppingcart glitch yesterday?"
Those of us that don't use that service perhaps kept quiet, leaving the floor open to those who had suffered through a weekend of lost sales. That's why I kept it zipped up anyway.
Just my 2 cents since you brought up your low response rate, and I sure hope 1 shoppingcart makes it up to you and all the other good people, that lost income due to a massive system failure.
Good luck!
B.
"My issue with 1SC is not just that they had a major system outage that last Saturday, Sunday and into Monday. My issue with them is that they are trying to hide the outage from their customers. That is unethical."
Wow. I had not realized that they were actually trying to hide their outage. The best outage experience I had was with dsnmadeeasy. They had a brief outage and automatically gave everyone a credit and sent out a very detailed explanation.
If you can't trust your shopping cart provider, why are you still using them? Do they have functionality that no one else offers?
You should checkout red oak cart (you can google it easily for the url). In addition to functionality, the customer service is top notch and included in your account. Drop me a line if you want to talk more….
Hi Everyone,
We let our customers down this weekend and there is no other way to describe this other than unacceptable. Times like this weekend are certainly darker moments in our history, but we take advantage of the lessons learned during these times and have already taken several actions since the weekend to further increase our reliability and recovery times in the case of a major hardware failure of this kind.
What I am proud of is that our team was so quick to react to the problem. We had many team members work right through the night Sunday and through the entire day Monday without any sleep as they were not only committed to solving the problem, but also taking action to prevent it from reocurring. I'm also proud of our Customer Service efforts considering that this outage occurred on the weekend when our standard support center is closed. Because of our On-Call Emergency Response plan we had members of all our teams jump into action to do ensure we were providing our customers with constant updates throughout the outage. Our Emergency 911 support team (available at 911 at 1shoppingcart.com after hours 24/7) responded to every emergency request we received and also provided a follow-up once we were back online.
I personally, was active on our Twitter account throughout the entire outage and was providing regular updates as our team worked through the issue. Every single one of these Tweets still exists on our Twitter page today (Twitter.com/1sc). Lisa – I am not sure why you don't see these tweets, but I can assure you they are there and will not be coming down. We also posted an announcement in everyone's accounts just before lunch time on Monday to ensure all of our customers were made aware of the weekend's issues and kep that information available for over 24 hours so everyone would see it when they first logged into their account.
At this point all I would like to say is that we are sorry. We greatly value the business of our customers. For anyone who wishes to receive more information regarding this weekend's events I encourage you to contact our Client Services Support team.
Regards,
Justin Bell
Director of Client Services
1Shoppingcart.com
Well her it is Friday 10/8/2010 at 10:30 in the morning and 1shopping cart is down again. It is time to find a new platform.
Yup! I've had it with them.
I forwarded this post to their customer service dept. I don't expect them to even address it… just like before.
Man, it is going to be a HUGE pain in the ass transferring all my recurring orders to another service providers. 1shoppingcart has now cost me a LOT of money… and I ain't happy!
I agree! Any suggestions?
I lost a lot of sales since I was in a major promotional cycle. Oh and as of today THEY ARE DOWN ONCE AGAIN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WEEK.
That sucks! I'm really sorry you have to deal this.
1shop is down AGAIN today (Friday).
I sent their customer support people to this blog post and this was their reply:
Hello Dan,
Thank you for your email, I can certainly appreciate your concern and your questions.
We have identified the problem and are presently working to correct the issues as quickly as possible. We understand the urgency in this matter and appreciate your patience while this issue is resolved.
Regrettably I do not have an ETA at the moment. We have all departments (Development, IT and Support) currently dedicated to resolving this issue as soon as we can.
We would like to extend our sincere apologies for any inconvenience that this system issue caused. Although our system is monitored regularly, regretfully we are not immune to spordic or unforseen situations that can arise. This is an isolated issue that is not hardware failure related as was the case the last weekend.
Our Management, Developments and IT Teams have created an action plan that will be implemented to prevent this particular issue from reoccuring in the future.
I will escalate this to our Team lead on your behalf. Once this issue has been corrected, he is then able to review any requests for compensation.
I will respond back again as soon as we have corrected the issue.
I apologize for any inconvenience this is causing.
Kind regards,
Rachel Buttery
Technical Support Client Services
I totally agree Lisa.
1sc was down for 15 hours over the weekend and they're down again right now. Did you notice that their email apology never states what days they were down – just gives times. I called customer service and because I am not paying for full customer service Mark at 1sc said he couldn't talk with me – even though my business had been affected by the downed service. I was in the middle of a launch and he wouldn't talk to me. I think that's pretty pitiful. I've often felt that 1sc doesn't give a hoot about their customers (except maybe the big ones) and I feel even moreso now. So I'll be checking into other options.
Cheryl, I will be MORE than glad to share the options I'm looking into… just as soon as I'm convinced they are better than 1shop.
I had a little technical incident like this recently with InstantTeleseminar.com. They responded as quickly as possible to fix this issue and apologized profusely. That was exactly what I expected of them.
The unexpected (and much appreciated) response was… they also gave me a credit so my next month of service was free.
Just saying…
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