Cyber Monday Means No Sales for Some Joomla Websites

Cyber Monday is a huge online event in North America (the US and Canada). For those who don’t know what it is exactly, it is the Monday immediately after Thanksgiving, and during that day, online retailers offer huge discounts on their products. Cyber Monday has gotten extremely popular since its inception back in 2005 and nowadays, even very small online retailers are taking advantage of that event to generate sales.

Now – enough with the introduction – and let us explain what happened yesterday morning (which was, coincidentally, Cyber Monday). A client called us and told us that his VirtueMart shop on his Joomla website is not working properly – he said that the transactions were not going through, and those that were going through, were not being registered properly. We started working on the client’s website immediately. A few minutes later, the phone rang again, it was another customer with the same problem. By 10 AM in the morning we had 7 clients calling in and telling us that their VirtueMart store is not working. They were all getting the following error:

Failure in Processing the Payment (ps_authorize)

When the same error happens em masse, we usually start questioning whether the problem is from the website itself or from elsewhere, and it didn’t take long for us to discover that the problem was indeed elsewhere: all these websites were using the same payment processor, and that payment processor was simply not able to cope with all the load on Cyber Monday (there were just too many simultaneous transactions – too many for that payment processor to handle). We actually called the payment processor to confirm the issue.

Unfortunately, the day that was supposedly going to generate more revenue than a whole week (or maybe a whole month) for most of these businesses, ended up as one of the most disappointing days in the whole year. Not to mention, of course, that some of the transactions were successfully processed by the payment processor but the latter returned fail for each of these transactions, which means that these small businesses also had to deal with clients who got charged for absolutely nothing. Not good!

We hope that Cyber Monday went well for you – if it didn’t because of a technical (and costly) glitch with your payment gateway, then maybe it’s time to consider an alternative. And, if you’re afraid of the technical hurdles when migrating from one payment processor to another, then fear not, we can help you there! Just contact us and we’ll migrate you to another payment processor, of your choice, in no time and for a very reasonable fee!

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