As a result, I spent the majority of July 3 talking to and calming down many of our ecommerce clients who use Authorize.net as their primary and in many cases, only online payment processor.

The biggest question/complaint I received was: “How could one of the biggest payment processors in the world be brought down by an incident at only one of their locations and why didn’t they have some type of redundancy in place that would prevent the entire network from going down?”

Although there has been no official report on how a fire at their primary data center also brought down their backup data center and even their public website,  this incident not only sheds light on having redundancy and fail-over on mission-critical systems but also the importance of having an alternate shopping cart checkout system in place for your online store.

In the past, store owners have primarily concentrated on redundancy for their website hosting, database and email servers but have ignored the one central point of failure that would bring their online sales screeching to a halt: their credit card processor.

Many of our clients that were using Authorize.net as their only payment processor are now implementing PayPal, Google Checkout or a secondary payment gateway on their stores as a backup in case there is another extended network failure from Authorize.net.

Having an alternate payment source such as PayPal or Google Checkout will allow merchants to continue to operate and process orders even if their primary payment provider is down or not responding to credit card authorization requests.

Although the Authorize.net incident yesterday cost merchants millions of dollars in lost sales, hopefully it will prevent future lost revenues by proving that ecommerce solution providers, no matter how large or small, will eventually suffer system outages and it is up to the merchant to prepare for such an emergency by having backups in place for all elements of their ecommerce site, including their payment provider.

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Kevin R. Rounsavelle
Founder, Site Store Professional
http://www.sitestorepro.com