We were at the Ohio Sauerkraut Festival in Waynesville, Ohio, and all set up... everything a go. Cell phone had 4 bars, square was up and running until about 11:30am when the entire bunch of us (440 artist vendors) lost internet and ability to run credit cards. In fact, i lost everything but texting capability. As we scrambled to rethink our processes we all realized this was an outage, or an overrun of the bandwidth of the internet provider/ cell towers. Througout the entire weekend we experienced ups and downs. Oddly, after leaving Waynesville our cell phones returned to normal function, and all of the pended credit card transactions went through.
So my first question is - has this happened to you?
Second question - what is your backup plan? Do you go to paper, and process the transactions when the system comes up?
Comments
Jim Parker - dont underestimate an odd sounding festival - a half million in attendance in two days is nothing to sneeze at. I have done much more prestigious events and we didn;t get a tenth of that....
Lynn- What i have a hard time understanding is for us to be juried in we were sent a letter asking for proof of process - photos, a written summary of the steps to dying silk, and making cold process soap. And we were asked for video of the processes, including photos of our studio space. I honestly thought they did this with everyone... and was feeling honored they screen so carefully. Then we got there and stuff on a stick and a number of booths selling things that were not handmade, nor artsy. And we talked with another soap maker who said "Huh, i never was asked anything about process... they accepted me without all that." So there was an inequity in how the jury process was done. That set me on slow sizzle.
I was at Colorfest in Thurmont MD. We had problems all weekend, but it was definitely with the carriers. This was odd since Thurmont is the home of the Presidential Retreat "Camp David". There was no phone system of any type for most of the weekend. AT first I thought it was just Sprint but Verizon, T-Mobile, and others were experiencing the same problems - no text, data, or voice service. Very frustrating for one of the largest shows of the year.
However, the poorer showing at the show was mostly due to the weather versus the loss of phone capability. Five straight days of rain (including the weekend) plus mud kept the crowds down. They understood the phone problems and paid with cash or check. Well at least this weekend is going to sunny.
I have been using Intuit Go Payment and have never had a problem with the program.
Thanks for the info on the Sauerkraut Festival. I thought it was a strongly juried event.
I'd like to hear more about the show. Thanks everyone !
I did the Roanoke fall classic this past weekend used my square with no problem
At times we waited 5 minutes for cards to go through....it was the carriers not the square.
This was a fabulous show for us....almost wiped us out! We are very unique "Steampunk genre" jewelry and accessories. We are not bored housewives stringing beads!!!!
BUT....that CRAP on a stick has to go. I found her "Handmade by her" junk in the ABC Distributing catalog. How do we get rid of junk like this? She painted over the made in China stamp and used a marker to put her name on it.
Oct 5 and 6th in Melbourne Florida I too had trouble with square which I had to manually enter in sales with the additional fees. I emailed them and they did not acknowledge some type of down time on there end but, did refund the additional fees for the one day.
yes, for the half million visitors the percentage of buyers was very low, and there was a lot of purchasing chineses made stuff on a stick lawn ornaments.... i hear you.
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