This Wednesday (8/22), a local power outage affected the 2Checkout.com transaction servers. 2CO is equipped to handle indefinite power outages with no loss of service, however because of multiple human errors committed when following 2CO’s power outage and backup power procedures, some orders placed between approximately 6:47 AM and 9:52 AM did not complete correctly. 2CO realizes that any lost sales are totally unacceptable and we are doing everything in our power to insure that similar staff errors cannot occur in the future.

We would also like to take this time to explain the effects of this outage and what we are doing to address these orders.

Affected orders would have been accompanied by the usual Order Confirmation emails, but suppliers will not be able to locate these order numbers in their 2CO accounts. Customers’ credit cards were authorized, but these authorizations will drop off, so the customers will not be charged for these orders.

To address these missing orders, we will be sending an email recommending that each affected customer place their order again. Each affected supplier will receive a copy of the appropriate email. If the customer does not follow up with a new order, the supplier can follow up by sending the customer further Request for Payment.

We apologize for any inconvenience this outage may have caused and assure you we are doing everything within our power to prevent similar events in the future.

If you have any questions or believe you have been affected, please contact our Customer Care team by opening a support ticket.

You may also give us a call at one of the phone numbers below:
1.614.921.2450 Main Number
1.877.294.0273 Toll-Free (US and Canada)
0.871.871.8283 United Kingdom

The third annual NYSE CEO Report finds CEOs increasing their focus on meeting and exceeding customer expectations to drive and maintain growth in the future.

“Almost one-third of CEOs will spend more time on customer relations; more than half expect to spend more money on it; and two in ten CEOs cite customer satisfaction as the most crucial element to their long-term success as CEO.”

Related links:

• NYSE-listed CEOs say customer focus to drive growth
• Leading CEOs Optimistic about Opportunities in Global Markets, Says NYSE CEO Report 2008

eWeek.com provides the following recent articles describing the continued growth of onlines sales:

• ComScore: Quarterly E-Commerce Sales Hit $47.5 Billion
• Euro E-Commerce Hits $133B, 25% Yearly Growth Projected

This is the first part of an ongoing series where we’ll be providing links to sites that provide useful information for helping you build your website. We welcome your suggestions for additional resources in the comments. Today, we’re focusing on site-building tools (web browsers and extensions) and HTML/CSS.

Site-building Tools

• Firefox - “The award-winning Web browser is now faster, more secure, and fully customizable to your online life.”
• Firebug - “Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.”
• The Web Developer extension - “The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.”

HTML/CSS

• W3Schools - “At W3Schools you will find all the Web-building tutorials you need, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia and WAP.”
• HTML Code Tutorial - “Our goal is to provide the most helpful and complete guide to creating web pages anywhere.”
• The Complete Reference HTML & XHTML - website supporting the fourth edition of the eponymous book
• URL Decoder/Encoder - “Handy for turning encoded JavaScript URLs from complete gibberish into readable gibberish.”
• CSS Formatter and Optimiser - “CleanCSS is a powerful CSS optimizer and formatter. Basically, it takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise.”
• CSS Panic Guide - a guide for the unglued. - “This is not a complete resource, this is a fast resource.”
• Tizag - “Tizag was designed to teach beginner web programmers how to use HTML and CSS.”
• Free Webmaster Help - “Everything a webmaster needs - for free. Here you will find many high quality tutorials and articles dealing with some of the most popular and important issues and technologies surrounding web development.”
• Web Form Factory - “Web Form Factory is an open source web form generator which automatically generates the necessary backend code to tie your form to a database.”

Do you have a site-building or HTML/CSS recommendation you would like to share? Please tell us about it in the comments.

Related Articles:

• Resource Links (Part 2) - PHP and Javascript
• Resource Links (Part 3) - Statistics and Graphics/Design
• Resource Links (Part 4) - Business/Financial
• Resource Links (Part 5) - Design/Usability

2Checkout.com strives to provide vendors with detailed stat tracking to assist in monitoring the financial history of their accounts.

A key aspect of this information is active tracking of refund and bank dispute amounts and percentages. These percentages play a key role in 2Checkout account evaluations, as well as determining the level of the rolling reserve that is applied to accounts.

2Checkout maintains the following criteria for acceptable refund and bank dispute percentages:

• Refund amounts should not exceed our acceptable limit of 10%.
• Bank Assisted dispute levels should not exceed our acceptable limit of 1%.

Percentages above these levels may lead to reserve increases, and can be detrimental to the overall profitability of your company.

Refunds and Bank Assisted Disputes that are deemed fraud related are weighted differently than those issued for service related issues, yet these stats should be monitored as well.

2Checkout encourages all vendors stay current on their account statistics and are proactive in using these tools to ensure the overall health and good standing of their accounts.