Thursday, January 28, 2010

Problems Checking Out? Blame the USPS!

Hey guys! Just a quick update. I was going through my usual routine, checking on open orders, answering customer questions, etc. when I noticed that sales were a little slow this morning. Granted, with any business, there are fluctuations, but this morning was a little slower than normal, and that usual means one thing: there is a PROBLEM somewhere!

After a little digging, I found the culprit, and it was the lovely US Postal Service! You see, since we have a one step checkout process for your convenience, we need to display all your available shipping options on one page. Well, the USPS was having issues where it was taking an incredibly long time for their servers to send the shipping prices to our servers.

What's that mean? Basically, if you went to checkout with us this morning, it may have looked like our website was HANGING and not responding. What was really happening is that our site was waiting patiently for the USPS to give us the shipping prices to display for you......and during this wait, it made it look like we were not responding.

So we temporarily removed the USPS shipping option from the site, leaving in place the UPS and free shipping option, just so customers could place their orders. At the time of this writing, it APPEARS to be off and on. We will get good response times from the USPS and put it back on the site.....and then it will go down again so we will remove it. I don't what's going on over there, but until they straighten it out, we will keep the USPS option removed from our site until it's cleared up.

Contact us if you have any further questions or concerns.

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