Magento Fail

Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2019 will go down in the record books as a fail for Magento.

Fresh off the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday, online retailers using the Magento 1 in companion with Authorize.net began to experience trouble processing online credit card payments from client’s trying to make purchases.

Magento websites interface with Authorize.net to process a payment and ultimately deposit the payment in the retailer’s bank account. Only today, the process wasn’t seamless. In December, Authorize.net, the real-time payment gateway popular with online stores, posted a message to changes to its functionality:

https://community.developer.authorize.net/t5/News-and-Announcements/Changes-to-Supported-Characters-Jan-22-2019/td-p/65435

Turns out Magento did not respond with a code update or patch to address this change resulting in probably every Magento 1 site using Authorize.net to break today’s date.

As of day’s end, still no word from Magento on an official patch. In the meantime, every affected site has to be updated manually. And then updated again when the patch is released.

UNLEADED.DIGITAL’S Chief Information Officer Ian Kullham diagnosed the problem and began applying it to customers’ SOS calls. And while these Magento 1 site owners are probably too focused on the financial damages today to think about getting a new website, you can be sure that when they get past this epic Magento fail that they’ll weigh moving away from Magento to Shopify.

Compare Magento’s problem with the Shopify platform which is experiencing no reported issues with authorize.net today. Because the Shopify platform is a hosted platform, Shopify is able to make updates for changes like this behind the scenes globally so that merchants aren't affected.

“The business losses experienced today on Magento websites should be enough to sell online retailers on making the switch to Shopify,” notes Ian Kullhem, UNLEADED.DIGITAL CIO.