AOL e-commerce problem

I

Inkseller

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I run a business with two e-commerce sites, outsourcing the card transactions to a secure card gateway company. When the customer clicks "submit order" two things happen simultaneously: 1) Order details are stored on our system, and 2) They are connected to the secure server at Protx (the card company) for secure submission of card details.

Everything runs fine with BT, Tiscali, Virgin, NTL etc etc but AOL customers are not being connected to the secure server because their browser will not allow the connection. The PROBLEM is recorded all over the place, but I can't find the SOLUTION. Clearly there is a solution because when I have contacted some of the customers (by telephone) who tried and failed to complete their order with my company, they have moved on and ordered elsewhere without difficulty.

Can anybody help? I'm willing to pay for the solution obviously!
 
Buy out AOHell and tell people to just use IE

Sarcastic comment aimed squarely at AOL ... we cannot educate AOL users, they were dumb enough in the first place to choose that ISP (that is a loose term for ISP) what can we do.

Print a big notice on your site explaining that AOHell do not use proper protocol and to use IE or Firefox ... I take it FF is OK.

:D


When I had my website I just "banned" AOL users from access ... I'm a funny bugger like that ... end of 'problem', but I was not a business. ;)
 
I think the only way round this is to modify your payment processor - how are you doing this at the moment? Are you using some ecommerce software like os-commerce or an inhouse solution?
 
Inkseller

The shopping cart designers were Charon Cart. Payments are processed by Protx (we changed from SECpay in the hope it would solve the AOL problem). We even set up a different check-out for AOL users to go onto our own secure server to input card details so we could to a manual card transaction in the office. The AOL customers in question have - on all 3 counts - been left dangling in the ether because AOL simply will not allow them to go into a secure server - they get an error message "Page cannot be displayed". It's not a server problem our end because all other ISP users are placing orders without difficulty. Our main site (if looking at it might help) is www.inksave.co.uk
 
This problem is often associated with those using AOL with a router - the problem is at their end - they need to set the MTU on the router to 1400 to allow this secure traffic through.

:thumb:
 
You took the words out of my mouth Ady ;)

On some of the newer routers this isn't a problem, but DLink equipment especially, it's a real pain in the you know what :D
 
Inkseller

I understand there may be a need for them (AOL users) to make adjustments their end, but frankly most AOL users would not know where to start.
There clearly IS a solution to this problem because many of the customers we have lost have moved on to our competitors and conducted a completely normal purchase without difficulty. I need a solution that doesn't rely on customer input. There must be somebody out there (please.....!) with a cure, surely???
 
Are you using VSPDirect, or VSPForm? I use protx with x-cart on one of my clients sites ( www.petpassions.co.uk ) and we've never had a problem with AOL users, that was with both VSPForm and VSPDirect.

I'll have a look at your site, see if it's doing anything weird and wonderful - some of these carts redirect to https in weird and wonderful ways!

Edit:

Not sure about it being caused by the MTU problem, as this problem also blocks major websites such as microsoft etc which is where the MTU problem becomes apparent

Had a look, and I noticed that the screen where you put the user information on isn't secure, it could be the way that the intermediate page transmits data to protx, perhaps it uses a javascript forward or something? I dunno...
 
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