Sage Pay upgrade woes hit merchants Thousands of e-commerce merchants are still struggling to process transactions following problems with a weekend upgrade by payment processor Sage Pay. The upgrade was designed to make transaction processing faster and more resilient for the 32,000 merchants in the UK and Ireland who rely on the firm's service to handle e- …
Another problem happened for one of my clients, the IP addresses for validation of authentic direct transactions were removed. This resulted in payments not being completed because SagePay saw the transactions coming from an invalid IP address.
Only one of my clients had this issue, though the other problems mentioned in the article have surfaced for some of my other clients as well. When SagePay works it's great, but whenever there's an upgrade to their services merchants suffer. Thankfully major upgrades to their service only occur once or twice a year, I just wish they'd implement more safeguards to ensure it's business as normal for merchants during the rollout of these upgrades.
Our accounts team have been moaning constantly and were on the phone for over an hour!(after waiting in a queue for >20 callers & 20 mins) For starters they didn't inform any of the "protx" users prior to the "upgrade" that the url for the admin logon had changed completely and was now hosted on sagepay.com and not protx.com, all they got was a "400 Bad Request" error when they tried to access it. Then they were informed they should change to Firefox if they wanted it to work "properly". When they finally got logged in they find the new interface is rubbish, making it really awkward to print out reports they way they had been used to. The new layout only showed 3 transactions on the screen due to the awful new format.
All in all a very, very poorly executed "upgrade".
...I think that it's your accounts team that's more of a problem for you than SagePay.
The URL change for the admin logon happened absolutely ages ago and involved several emails from Protx/SagePay telling everyone what was happening. We were certainly well enough notified and we're just a little diddy business. Both admin URLs have been working in parallel for some time, presumably to give people enough opportunity to switch over to the SagePay one(s) prior to the Protx one(s) being dropped. Similarly, the current changes to the live gateway processing URLs/addresses have been widely announced - we must have received somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen emails about it over the last six to nine months to remind us to check our systems and make sure that we're ready for the change.
As for the new admin interface, please don't make me go back to the old one. It was a total crock of shite. Yes, there are still features in the new one that I would like to see added or changed, but we're finding it much easier on the eye and much more useful for tracking down specific transactions, settlements, etc. than the old. As for only being able to see three transactions, tell your users to close the selection pane once they've finished choosing what they want to see - they'll then see more transactions on the page.
Mind you, the initial default dates on the transaction page were a bit of a cockup (including all transactions from the last 7 years or something?!??) Apparently they're fixing that straight away. And they could have made it clearer that clicking on the month or year on the calendars gives you a drop down selection box - the first time I was trying to narrow things down to the most recent few days' transactions, I spent ages clicking on the next/previous buttons on the calendars before I thought that there must be an easier way (and it turned out there was).
So, overall, not at all perfect, but I find it rather better than what went before, not worse.
And for those who are saying that things were more stable back in the old Protx days, then I think you need the tints taking off your glasses. Protx, as Protx, had just as many glitches, faults and update cockups as it has had since it became SagePay. That's been my experience over the last few years anyway.
Of course, when it comes to getting products and services that work properly and upgrades that don't cause breakdowns or outages, what we really need is a culture change in the whole IT/software/online services industry. But that's a different argument for another day.
I've run two test transactions today, buying things off our own site with my debit card and neither of them has even appeared in our transaction report yet. Presumably one day I will be able to refund them... The admin site is terribly flaky, you see the "Oops" message all the time and then you get locked out for 15 minutes.
Protx used to be really cool, it just did what it said on the tin and everyone was happy. Then Sage got hold of it with their corporate brown fingers and it has duly turned to shit, which is now headed fanwards.
The admin site isn't even fit to be an alpha as it stands. Sage shouldn't expect their customer base to come along for the development ride until it's usable - they need to roll back to the old site now and take the new one back in the lab for a few more months - or forever, as it doesn't seem to bring anything to the party. The old one was just fine.
Apparently Sage don't believe in the expression "If it ain't broken don't fix it". They should have it tatooed on all their foreheads.
...but I'm already totally pissed off with SagePay. It's taken since July to get my account set up, I'll not go in to detail here. I received login credentials on Monday and have spent the week so far trying to get this crock of shit to work. I can't comment on whether the old MySagePay interface was better as I have never seen it, but the majority appear to feel it was. All I can say is that it's clunky and unstable, so not the best first impression. Reading the Sage Pay forums makes me feel like have made one hell of a bad decision for my new business with respect to the payment gateway! Sage Pay need to get their finger out of their arse, and quick.
I hit a problem with SagePay around two weeks ago when my card kept being declined for "unspecified reasons". The girl at the company mailed me to say SagePay was has been acting up all week so I had to phone my card info across to be entered into their terminal manually. Guess what, it worked.
Interesting time discrepancy, though.
We need to make sure that the company that provided the new system is named and shamed - especially the snake-oil salesmen.
I'm assuming that it was bought in as these companies never seem to understand that you need in-house expertise and long term contractors to get something to work. They all seem to follow the thoroughly discredited put out to tender and award contract to lowest quote/shiniest Mercedes model of building software.
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