I highly recommend the practice.
If you live in the Pioneer Valley in Western Mass, there’s a new Futon Shop in West Springfield! Home Apartment Shops has been around for a while, but it look from their website as though they’ve started stocking some nice futon frames, mattresses and covers from some nice sources. So, if you’re in the market for a new futon, there’s no reason to head up to Northampton or Amherst anymore. Just stop by the Home Apartment Shops in West Springfield.
If you have a great dane, or other large dog, websites like Petco or Amazon can often be fruitless in your search for dog supplies and accessories. So, my great dane, Jay, gets very cold in the winter and was in need of a jacket to keep him warm. Noelle and I search forever in an attempt to find one that fit him correctly, when we found a fantastic website with horse supplies. They had the a jacket made for a pony that was just the right fit. Now Jays goes outside in the winter without complaint.
Friday, July 3rd, Authorize.net was down for almost 24 hours! Authorize.net, one of the leading credit card processing companies in the US suffered a major business glitch when their data center in Seattle experienced a fire. This wiped out their credit card processing, website, and backup center functions for the entire day. Couple this disaster with the fact that the Authorize.net staff was away for their July 4th holiday weekend and you have a recipe for thousands of lost sales and angry merchants.
So what, if anything, should merchants have learned from this experience?
Have several payment methods available on your site! Almost everyone has a Paypal account, a credit card, and some are even catching on to Google card processing services. The odds that all three could go down in one day are astronomically high, and if one system goes down you can always send your customers to a different payment gateway.
