Sage Pay upgrade glitch forced poor password picks Payment provider Sage Pay is investigating a weekend upgrade that resulted in a minority of users being obliged to adopt a less secure password that only contained alphanumeric digits. The issue was brought to our attention by a number of Reg readers who told us the upgrade "knocked off users who use special characters in …
"unspecified minority of Sage Pay users"
should read:
"every fuming bloody one of them.."
I Fucking Hate SAGEPAY we WILL be moving away asap. They are now my new deffinition of "truely incompetant".
Hey why dont we take down our working reporting webstie (vspadmin) and replace it with a chronically slow under resourced duffer (mysagepay) where the interface doesn't fit your screen (just a quater on mine) and the new 'superior' reports dont even have totals....
The angke of the story here is incorrect - the password restriction was a small problem in a massive F-up.
The SagePay claim that this horrendous messup is affecting a minority of their customers is an absolute untruth. Only 75% of transactions were being processed yesterday. Calling a customer to ask why they didn't complete their order to be told that they couldn't get their payment through so bought elsewhere is a real kick in the teeth. Thanks SAGEPAY.
Not only that, but the new MySagePay admin area is a great looking area - I'll give them that, but has massively reduced functionality. Simply browsing today's transactions to look for potentially fraudulent transactions is now impossible due to the poor search functionality and removed features.
Also, designing the screen for an 800x600 size screen is ridiculous - I spent £2k on a massive monitor to use the whole screen, not to use an eighth of the screen and have to use horizontal scroll bars on a slow, buggy unnecessarily AJAX driven table.
I agree that the old system was a little clunky - but this is a step backwards.
if my empolyer had only provided me with a screen the size of a post card and a PC that slow and unresponsive, Id' QUIT!
Back in the real world, however... some of us are using 19" monitors, and good two year old PC's. that normally respond when you click, not after a siesta.
Oh and if it works 'oh so fine' for you, can you explain how to get a total on the daily batch report?
Reports without totals are pointless crud.
As a merchant: since the weekend upgrade, our customer service staff have been unable to get any transactions through ever on the first attempt (most often it logs them out mid-transaction) and consequently unable to get any transactions through while the customer is still on the phone, they can't search by postcode because it only allows one "word" as a search term, response is far from "half a second faster", it's seriously slow, and as the poster before me notes, there's no totals in the reports, very little of the screen real estate is available such that you can hardly see the information you need, etc. This is presumably designed primarily for API use not for people to use directly. Looking forward most of all to speedy resolution of the slow-speed and random log-you-out problems on the "Terminal".
Sorry, not every Sagepay customer has had problems this severe. We've done proprietary integrations for over a dozen of our ecommerce customers and the only issues we experienced were a couple of failed refund transactions and some backend merchant interface bugs.
The interface IS quicker for me, although it's almost as unusable as the old Protx system. But then Sage is well known for its complete ignorance of UX in every product.
But if you want a totally shit, unusable, unspecced and impenetrable system, you could try RBS Worldpay and see how good Sage is by comparison. At least Sage's technical department know their way around their own product, as opposed to the RBS drone who gave a nonchalant chuckle when we told him how much revenue was going down the toilet as a result of a glitch in their XML interface.
Depends how you use it though. For those who are integrated via Direct services then the chances are they don't go near the admin site, however if you use their Server or Form based solutions, you'll be using it everyday.
Its the latter group who really suffer here, although a few of my clients used the admin site for reporting, which they now can't do. Well, they can do but they have to go through the transactions one at a time.
Its still an epic fail for such a big company to roll out such a badly designed and buggy system though.
Sagepay doesn't work with the iphone - it used to for a while but then they changed a HTTP header and seem incapable of fixing it.
I've been forced to purchase a number of products on sites that don't use Sagepay as that's been easier than locating a PC. I contacted the sites to let them know and they said they knew about it as other customers had complained. It surely can't be that hard to fix?
The password issue did indeed affect only a small minority of users. However, there are dozens of other issues which affect most users. This update has been the biggest screw-up for some time, and whoever was in charge of the development has really messed up.
The first problem we encountered was Saturday night when I started getting SMSs from our server about failed payments. Contacted SP, who insisted that there were no problems at their end. After about half an hour of debugging, I found the problem - their SSL cert on the new server was broken.
After resolving this, we had several 10-20 minute down periods on Monday.
But this was just the beginning. The biggest issue is that the new user interface is a complete mess. It's the worst example of what you can do with grid controls, iframes and ajax. Usability is terrible, and it regularly throws up 'Oops, this operation did not complete' errors.
On top of that, you are limited to an 800px wide iframe, which means you have to horizontally and vertically scroll to do anything.
Common tasks take about twice as long with the new interface as they did with the old.
The old interface worked - it was dated, and could have done with a tidy, but it worked. What they have built to replace it is a fantastic demonstration of how not to build a UI.
judging by the comments everyone is more angry about the changes to mysagepay than they were about the password fuck up?
I had to unlock and reset about 5 accounts (of 12) because the passwords got screwed up.. I'm Guessing that because they had special SQL chars like % that they were borked in the transfer.
I then had to spend an hour explaining to 12 people that yes they have to reconfigure the reports everyday because you cant save your layout... oh and yes then youy have to export load into excel and then sum to get a total, oh yeah and dont forget to extract the refunds from the purchases first... geeze that went down well...
We've had one regular customer attempt a transaction four times and fail each time. Then it starts working for a while. Then you can't log in to the admin page, then you can log in again.
The new SagePay mantra is "Oops! You encountered a problem... ". Then you get "We'd suggest you try once more using the back button on your browser". Really? On a secure payment site?
It's all over the place. It would be a great Failblog.org candidate if only it was funny.
As stated it's how you use SagePay.
We use both the mysagepay virtual terminal and server integration and the server integration works fine.
The mysagepay upgrade however has given us no end of problems. We probably notice it more as we have about 30 vendor accounts throughout the country and they've all been saying the same thing:
Logins failing randomly (they're all alphanumeric, no strange characters at all)
Very slow loading pages (possibly browser version though)
User Interface appalling
Reports almost unusable
The main complaint is just the number of times the system falls over, but the other complaints include increased time to actually enter details and the lower functionality of the reports. Why on earth did they get rid of the daily transaction report?
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