back to article Merchants remain angry over Protx outage

The fallout from the outage of UK payment processing firm Protx is continuing. Thousands of online merchants were unable to take payments last Wednesday as a result of a mishandled upgrade that left payment systems at Protx unavailable. Several Reg readers also reported they were unable to reach the firm by either phone or …

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  1. Name

    Barclays

    To be fair to Protx, Barclays Merchant Services themselves gave us conflicting implementation dates for 3D Secure. Initially they told us July 2007. Now they're saying March 2008.

    I think the banking industry in general has handled the introduction of 3D Secure appallingly. Customers haven't been informed about it and so they either panic and think it's a phishing scam or blame the retailer and accuse us of having stupid unfriendly websites. Chip and Pin was trailed all over the place for months beforehand, 3D Secure is being introduced piecemeal.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Banks at fault

    The biggest problem we (condomcity.co.uk) faced is a lack of knowledge of the 3D Secure with our Customers. We have had numerous customers back out of the transactions when confronted with the 3D secure form from their bank, thinking that it is a phising attempt. We as an IT industry have been teaching customers to do this for some time, i.e. not hand over details that you don't expect to be asked for, so we can't blame the customer. I too would have backed out of such transactions, were it not for the fact that I was aware of 3D by being a merchant. The banks really need to pull up their socks and let their customers know about 3D.

    We even had one e-mail from a regular customer informing us that our website had been "hacked" and demanding to know what we were going to do to compensate them for the fact that "hackers" probably had stolen their identity!

    While I will join in with the general disappointment at the downtime with Protx, I can say that after 2pm we didn't suffer any further issues with the Protx system. We had followed Protx's advice and information that they first sent out months ago and implemented 3D and thoroughly tested our websites on their simulators etc. in advance of the changeover date.

    And as for those that had lost "thousands of pounds" because of the outage, I can only wonder why if they are processing that volume of transaction they would pay £20 a month or similar for a critical part of their payment infrastructure and not have a backup payment provide just in-case. Even one that charges 10x Protx's fees would be cheap compared to the "thousands" that they claim to have lost in sales.

  3. Kevin Kenny

    Barclays FUD

    We don't use Protx but we were also told by our payment processor (SecPay - they're pretty good and solid and very crossplatform and dev friendly) that the deadline for 3D secure for Maestro cards was the end of June 2007. So after rushing around and implementing the change we find out that Barclays aren't actually finishing off their end until early 2008 - grrr.

    Protx probably shoulda done better with their upgrade, but Barclays should've come clean about the 'actual' schedule they were running with.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This isn't the banks fault - this was an upgrade.....

    ...that went seriously wrong.

    Where was the communication during this downtime?

    Where was the roll back? - Didn't happen

    Where was the contingency? - Was there one?

    Where was the support? - Only the poor girl at Sage taking angry phone calls when protx redirected all their lines!

    We followed protx's documentation - or at least we tried to - the fact it contradicts itself all over the place, is inconsistent and positively inaccurate caused us great problems. Not to mention the staff and managements attitude when we finally did get to speak to someone.

    I don't care if it's 20.00 per month or 1000.00 per month the fact is they screwed it up. If you bought a 10p chew and it had glass in it, you'd bitch just as much as your 10.00 chew with glass in it. Just because it's cheap doesn't mean it should be crap!

  5. Richard

    3D "Secure" & Halifax

    My bank, the Halifax, have been doing this to my online account for a few months. It's incredibly annoying because the phishing page sorry, I mean important security page, _does not_ come from halifax.co.uk or some recognisable domain It comes a site, the exact domain I forget now, but the domain contains an apparently deliberate misspelling. Double doh!

    I've backed out of all such transactions so far and told the Halifax I want to opt out of this scheme until they fix the above problems.

    Rich.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    moving on

    I've spent hours on the phone to Protx - it has taken over an hour to get to the head of the queue. Despite that I still can't get payments to work my site. I get as far as entering a 3DSecure password and then the whole system dies messily on the screen showing a Tomcat Server/servlet stack trace - to the customer! very unprofessional and rank bad programming. It doesn't matter what card I use, they all die.

    I can't get Protx to acknowledge that the problem is at their end; they keep trying to shift the blame, saying that it's my confirmation page - despite the fact the system dies before it gets back to me. It looks to me that the problem lies in the transfer of data to and from the card companies but I'm a mere customer, what do I know?

    I've had enough. Protx obviously don't know what's wrong - let alone how to fix it.

    I'm moving on and, judging by the comment I'm getting from other providers, so are a lot of merchants. It may cost me more but you get what you pay for and I can't afford the effect on my business any longer. My next and only questions are - do I get any compensation for 7 days (and counting) loss of turnover and if not who to sue?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "I would again apologise for any inconvenience"

    I hate the phrase. It's self-evident that it caused massive inconvenience. I was taught to apologise for "the inconvenience"

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    3DSecure?

    First I've heard of it as a customer, what is it?

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Letter from Managing Director to all Protx customers

    "It was my decision as CEO to resolve the system outage on the new platform and not to roll back to the old Protx payment platform which may have caused even more disruption to our merchants."

    "Many merchants may have felt that the system outage lasted beyond 2:30pm

    because they had not applied the changes that we had informed them of

    over the last 6 months." So your customers are the a**holes here?!

    The documentation was plain wrong, account managers and support were having problems distinguishing their backsides from their elbows. Leaving merchants to guess.

    Brilliant customer service. What's more we've had yet more problems today and the status page is green - Protx timing out? That is surely the customers fault......

  10. Mario Thomas

    Mixed Messages about 3D Secure

    As a digital agency specialising in ecommerce websites we have over 50 merchants who's online operations rely on us day in day out.

    The 3D secure roll out has been a total disaster in terms of planning, customer information and implementation.

    As an example, we have 8 customers who use Barclaycard Merchant Services (BMS) for settlement. Four of those customers have recently started receiving statements from BMS for increased transaction fees - in some cases as high as 5% - even though we've rolled our 3D secure to all of our merchants!

    When our clients raise this with BMS, the charges are then removed.

    This is an odd play for a high street bank - tell everyone that 3D secure is not due to be rolled out until June 2008, but then start charging if your transactions are not 3D secure!

    We've got plenty more examples of how other banks have handled this whole process.

    With regards to ProTX - it seems they still haven't sorted out their systems after all this time. We dropped them in 2003 after two VERY painful years of explaining to our merchants why payments weren't working.

  11. Peter

    Customer charged SIX times for one transaction!

    Regards the comment: "after a minute or two they retry the TXN and the customer gets charged twice".

    We thought this tale was telling, as one of the companies we develop for (debonelle.com) had one of their customers charged SIX times for one transaction.

    Protx acknowledged TWO of the transactions (server to server), didnt acknowledge the debonelle server at all about the other FOUR but they debited the customers card every time. The customer is wholly adamant that they only clicked ONCE (and they say it took 'only a second or two tops' to authorise) then... kop this: Protx say it is must be down to a fault of ours in programming. <slow shaking of head>. The transactions for the customer were all refunded and we hope Protx 'accidently' do the refunds six times too!

    You've gotta hope this service gets better, it can only go one way! At least its not as poor as NetBanx =/

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It can't get much worst

    A week on and it's still all over the place. Good to know the status page has changed to a big green light. Everythings ok ------ phew ------ except that it isn't - multiple changes to single customers - our logs show they clicked once. Taking money then not advising the scripts that it's happend. Time outs (we've waited over 500 seconds!). No response to scripts. It's all screwed up AGAIN!

    We've been told it's our scripting - it's amazing that it's worked for over 2 years and now it's broken and all we've changed is the url we're pointing to!

  13. Scott Mckenzie

    Process Time

    Slightly alarming was the 8 working days it took from the payment date (VSP Terminal) to it actually landing with our bank!!!

  14. Ian Stewart

    Moving on 2

    For anyone that's interested, SecureTrading is offering Protx users a deal which works out only slightly more expensive than Protx.

  15. Glen Davies

    merchants are to blame?!?

    "merchants who experienced system problems beyond Wednesday afternoon had only themselves to blame for not applying changes it had informed them about over the last six months"

    I'm not sure how they can say that as when I phoned up the people at Sage admitted it was their fault as did the technical staff at ProTX who I was forwarded onto when I told him I was getting the following error:

    HTTP Status Code: 500

    HTTP Status Message: The request was unsuccessful due to an unexpected condition encountered by the server.

    Error Code : 5003

    Error Description : Internal server error.

    An error which I am still getting since last week.

    "Internal Server Error" Does that sound like an error a merchant can cause?

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