Is Your Web Site Held Hostage By Service Providers?
Do you use ... services to track the links on yourWeb site? What about for ... your online credit ... If so, you are probably losing sales that you don't even know about. Sorr Do you use third-party services to track the links on yourWeb site? What about for processing your online credit cardpayments? If so, you are probably losing sales that you don't even know about. Sorry, but it's a fact.Third-Party Services Defined.Let me explain what I mean by "third-party" services. Theseare the "link tracking" type of services that one canpurchase from various online companies. People use thespecial html link codes that these services provide to keeptrack of how visitors move around their Web sites. In returnfor a monthly fee, the user gets online access to a Web sitethat stores their link tracking information on a database,and gives them access to tracking statistics. This allowsusers to quickly and easily find out such things as whichlinks visitors to their Web sites click on, and how often.But, it's not just link tracking services I'm talking abouthere. Payment processing gateways is another type of third-party service that many of us are dependent upon.These third-party services are great in theory, and whenthey're working well they're also great in practice. BUTthere can be a definite downside to them. That downside isthis. If that service company's servers or and/or networkgo down for any reason, you go down with them! A Case In Point.After a few bad experiences over the past year, I have madeit a habit to check all of my Web sites every morning. Iquickly open each of the home pages and click on a few keylinks and make sure they are working as they're supposed to.Of course, I don't have the time to check each and everylink, but I do test the key ones I know my visitors tend toclick on most often on their way to making a purchase. And,I definitely check the main "order" links on each page. If I find that these links are not working for some reason,as I have on numerous occasions, it is about the worstthing that could happen. In fact, it could ruin one's wholeday, because it means lost sales!Last week while doing one of these routine checks Idiscovered that a number of links were not working on oneof my sites. I did some further checking and realized thatthese links had not been working for more than 12 hours!What this meant was that visitors to my site had been/wereclicking on these links and getting a blank page full ofgibberish that indicated that my service provider's database was corrupted. In effect, this problem was cripplingmy site.You know what that meant to me of course - lost visitorsAND lost sales!Long story, short. It took more than 24 hours from myinitial call until the problem was fully resolved. Thiswas during a prime sales period in the middle of the week.Consequently, I estimate that during the 36-hour periodthat my site was intermittently "out-of-action" due tothis problem, I lost somewhere between 6 and 8 sales.Ouch! I can't afford that. Can you?Here are a couple of other quick examples of similaroccurrences that some of you might be able to identify with.Lost Weekend. Lost Sales.One Friday night a few months ago I discovered that thelinks on two of my sites were not functioning properly.These links were being tracked by one of the "big name"services that is widely marketed across the Net. Believeit or not, I spent that whole weekend checking my linksregularly and then trying to get in touch with thisso-called "service" provider (I use the term "service"advisedly here).Well, my links didn't work for that entire weekend. At thetime, I did some research through my ISP that put me intouch with the gateway site for my service provider. WhenI contacted the gateway company by telephone, they advisedme that my service provider's servers were dropping allconnections and nobody there was responding!It just so happens that that particular service providerprominently advertises "24/7" support service in all oftheir marketing copy! Well, I'm sad to report that not oncethat weekend did anyone at that company ever respond toone of my many e-mails or phone calls. It appears they alltook the weekend off and crossed their fingers thatproblems wouldn't occur. Unfortunately for their customers,problems did occur. So, effectively, my two sites were shutdown for an entire long weekend because of that problem.There went another 5 to 10 sales!To add insult to injury, these people never once contactedme the following week to apologize for the inconvenienceand loss of business they might have caused me (as well asto thousands of others, presumably).Lost Weekdays. Lost Sales.A couple of months ago, the links to my "big name" paymentprocessing company stopped working for an extended periodof time. I found out later that they had experienced amajor power outage that shut down their entire network.They were out of commission for somewhere between 12 and 20 hours. Apparently, they did not (do not?) have a backuppower source in case of such an interruption! Duhhh, thisis the year 2002 isn't it?This is a major online payment processor I'm talking abouthere folks. Shouldn't such back-up be standard for a majorpayment processor? The implications of this for the smallonline business person were enormous of course: during thatperiod, literally tens of thousands of dollars in saleswere lost by thousands of that service provider's customers!At least three more examples of such shoddy third partyservice provider incidents that occurred over the past yearcome to mind as a write this. But alas, I'm out of space.Bottom Line. Don't Accept It.If you use third party services for anything like linktracking or payment processing, don't assume that thingsare always running along smoothly on "automatic pilot" assome of the Internet gurus would lead you to believe.Be constantly vigilant, and when you discover a problem,sound the alarm right away, and don't let your "service"provider off the hook until the problem is fixed.If you get any kind of "run-around" at all, head for themajor message boards and discussion forums. That should getthem to take you a bit more seriously in a hurry.Finally, whatever you do, DO NOT accept the type of thirdparty service breakdowns that I describe above. Theywouldn't be acceptable in offline business, so why shouldwe accept them online? Article Tags: Third-party Services, Link Tracking, Service Provider's Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com .
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