You may have noticed some downtime on the website and forums this weekend.  This was due to our migration from Microsoft Server 2003 to Server 2008.  Our Shopping cart will be functioning by the end of the day, as we are waiting on our SSL certificate migration to complete.  So, the shopping cart (and associated web pages) will not work until then.

The Shopping Cart Issue:

Over the past few months, when a customer goes to checkout and/or sign in, their shopping cart is emptied.  It happens at random times, and it doesn't seem to matter what browser is being used.  After several attempts, frustrated customers simply don't place the order (and I don't blame them).  We should make it easy to spend your money!

Resolution:

In order to improve our website and reduce the number lost customer shopping carts during checkout, we have migrated our website over to be hosted on a Windows Server 2008 machine.

Migrating the website to Server 2008 allowed use to double the amount of application pool memory from 100MB to 200MB.  This reduces the number of times the application pool gets recycled. We've learned that when the application pool recycles, all customer shopping carts get cleaned out. 

We will also be making a change later today so that customer shopping cart session data will be stored in our database.  Therefore when/if the application pool recycles (at random times), your shopping cart contents will persist.   This does impose a small performance hit, but at least your cart isn't lost.

We appreciate your patience while we figured this issue out, and we hope we won't be seeing any more empty shopping carts during customer checkouts.

Feedback:

If anyone does encounter any issues while checking out, please don't hesitate to drop us a line, or post, and we'll be glad to help you check out (over the phone if need be).

Best Regards,

Jason Summerour
President,
Summerour Robotics Corporation
www.roboticsconnection.com

Hopefully, we'll have this resolved by Monday, and we can put the checkout issues behind us...

Best Regards,

Jason Summerour
President,
Summerour Robotics Corporation
www.roboticsconnection.com

The problem?  The Yourpay/Linkpoint payment gateway API sucks.  For the last four years we've used the Yourpay payment gateway to process orders.  While we haven't really had any issues up until this point, everything we've read indicates that the order transaction API is really bad, and really hard to integrate with.  Once we migrated to Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0, their API just didn't play well, and this caused our shopping cart to choke when an order was placed.    We tracked the issue down in the website code to the place where the order was being placed, and we had a very good suspicion that it was the gateway.   Once we realized this, I knew it was time to switch payment gateway, and that's just what we did!  The first time we tested an order using the new payment gateway, it went thru a-okay.

Fortunately, the problem didn't have anything to do with Windows Server 2008, or IIS 7.0, or our awesome shopping cart software (from AspDotNetStoreFront.com).   This is a good thing, as I was starting to doubt my decision to migrate our website over (which was done to prevent our customers from losing their shopping carts when the application memory pool got recycled, and improve customer usability).

I have to send BIG KUDOS out to the team at both AspDotNetStoreFront and DiscountAsp.net for helping us track this problem down.  If you're looking for either a shopping cart provider to use, or a hosting company to use, look to both of these for awesome products, and awesome support!

I also have to apologize to those 40 or so customers who had to deal with no order confirmation page when placing an order for the last few weeks.  Thank you for your patience, and I hope this whole migration project will, in the end, make your experience shopping with us much more positive.

Best Regards!

Jason Summerour
President,
Summerour Robotics Corporation
www.roboticsconnection.com