Online merchants witness a substantial drop in Christmas sales, due to attacks on credit card companies from the supporter's of wikileaks.

Go Be Digital (Vsourz Ltd) – a web design agency and specialist ecommerce solution provider noted that their clients’ sales dropped to almost zero on Wednesday the 8th December for a period of several hours.

Apparently, ecommerce credit card systems were attacked causing MasterCard, Paypal and Amazon to fail. This also affected payment service providers like Sagepay who act as intermediaries. As soon as the payment service providers like Sagepay went down, the merchants started receiving phone calls from frustrated online customers shopping online for their Christmas list. Having browsed through the websites and decided what to buy, they were in for a shock to see that their credit cards were declined.

John from Go Be Digital (Vsourz Ltd) reported that they witnessed sudden rise in support calls from Ecommerce Web Design clients. Web design companies like Vsourz are normally first port of call for online ecommerce merchants for support. John further commented that – “Typically a merchant could lose anything between £4000 to £35000 worth of sales in a matter of hours during this busy shopping period of the year. One of the advices we offered to our ecommerce website merchants was to phone the customers and arrange for alternate methods of payment or ask them to try shopping again in a few hours’ time. Our ecommerce platform tracks abandoned carts and records difficulties faced by customers during the checkout process – so they were able to identify whom to ring. However, this is unnecessary hassle for our ecommerce website clients at this busy time of the year”.

Sagepay is a payment service provider for thousands of online retailers. Their payment systems went down on two separate occasions during the same week. Simon Black, managing director of Sage Pay explained to the customers reasons for the down time – one being a hardware fault and another being related to the attacks.

These incidents are an eye-opener for all web design & ecommerce development companies. They now know how vulnerable they are and how important it is to focus their energies and efforts on developing online ecommerce solutions which caters for these kind of contingencies or to have alternate systems in place if something untoward happens.

www.vsourz.com carries more than 8 years of experience in e-commerce design and web development. Today many leading UK brands dominates first page search engine rankings through the result oriented SEO London services provided by Vsourz Ltd.