Seems on Friday, 30th May, they’re going to have about an hour’s downtime when they won’t be processing payments – so nobody can buy your stuff during that time. At least that’s how it reads to me.

I’m just hoping they don’t break anything like they did a week or two back, when IPN got busted for a while. IPN stands for Instant Payment Notification and it’s the bit that makes it possible for your customer to pay you and then be redirected to a download page to get their stuff.

A couple of days after that they started canceling a ton of subscriptions, it seems, where there was no reason to do so – at least according to the subscription members who contacted me.

Not their best month, I think.

As I say, I’m hoping they won’t do anything that hurts us with this maintenance, but with systems as complex as theirs must be, it’s impossible to tell until it’s too late. A couple of weeks back I wrote about the special offer 2Checkout were having. You could open up an account and get the sign-on cost returned. I did just that, for the sole purpose of having a back-up payment processor for the future.

Boy, am I glad I did that now.

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This is really time sensitive and after 10 pm EST 6th May 2008 this post no longer matters!

If you want to take payments online there are a number of ways to do it, but a lot of them require payment from you to sign up. That’s why Paypal is so popular. It’s free and it’s instant.

2CO is a great alternative and really you should always have an alternative payment processor, just in case. Your primary processor might dump you, or stop working, and your customers might prefer to use one type of processor compared to another.

Certainly, a lot of potential customers don’t like Paypal for some reason.

So, if you’ve got $50 you can sign up at 2CO and offer your customers a wider choice of payment methods. More choice usually means more sales. And that’s to be encouraged.

But for one day only, 2CO are offering to refund your signup fee. So you get an account for nothing. There’s no excuse not to sign up now – is there?

Why not read it from the horse’s mouth? Here’s their blog entry announcing the 12 hour special deal.

www.2checkout.com

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