Dealing with processor outages

It’s your busiest day of the year. Items are flying off the virtual shelf, and then suddenly, everything stops. 

Panic sets in. 

Your website? Still up. Products? Displayed perfectly. But the numbers—frozen. No sales, no transactions.

You race to your orders view and see that they are all pending, and no user is successfully completing the checkout. 

Your worst fear becomes a reality: Your payment processor is down.

You get on the phone. It’s an automated system. You send an email. The response is, ‘We’ll get back to you in 24 hours.’ 

The clock is ticking, and every second means lost revenue. Meanwhile, all eyes are on you, and there’s nothing you can do but watch as potential revenue slips away.

The nightmare of a processor outage

For any payment leader, a processor outage during peak sales season (or any period)  is the stuff of nightmares. Without the ability to accept payments, your sales pipeline freezes, leaving you helpless as countless customers fail to make their purchases and disappear into the ether—or the hands of your competition.

Of course, this scenario is intensified when you work with a single processor, as you have zero redundancy. In other words, there is literally nothing you can do but hope your processor comes back online.

Don’t let the risk of processor outages haunt your business. 

Your first line of defense is building redundancy into your payment infrastructure. Relying on a single processor, no matter how reliable they claim to be, exposes your business to systemic risks. 

That’s where Primer comes in. Many businesses in this scenario are turning to us because we allow you to switch on new payment services in minutes rather than weeks, removing the legacy challenges of building a multi-processor payment stack.

However, even with some redundancy, significant issues can still occur if you don’t detect the outage in real-time and lack the technological flexibility to reroute transactions swiftly.

While Primer can’t prevent a processor from experiencing downtime, our Monitors can ensure you’re instantly aware of it.

Here’s how it works:

• Set up monitors: Configure alerts based on critical metrics like ‘Payment Count’ to detect when transactions stop.
• Real-time alerts: When your payment volume drops below a preset threshold, you’ll get instant alerts via Slack, Email, webhook, or any channel you choose.
• Diagnosis: Primer’s dedicated ‘Event’ pages show exactly why payments are failing so you can respond quickly.
• Take action: With just a few clicks in Primer’s Workflow, you can switch to another processor and keep transactions flowing.

Take a look at our blog to learn more.

In minutes, your payments are back online, minimizing downtime and preventing lost revenue.

Bonus: Get insurance with fallbacks 

We have another tool in our arsenal that provides you with another layer of protection: Fallbacks. 

With Fallbacks, Primer can automatically retry certain failed payments with a secondary processor. So, even if your primary processor goes down, payments can seamlessly continue without manual intervention.

That means fewer lost sales, fewer frustrated customers, and less risk to revenue.

Learn more about why you need a fallback strategy.

Sleep soundly with Primer 

Processor outages pose a significant threat to any business. When your payments fail, everything grinds to a halt, jeopardizing your revenue and reputation.

At Primer, we’ve developed a comprehensive suite of tools designed to eliminate this risk and keep your business running smoothly, no matter what challenges arise.

Take a look at our interactive demo to learn more.