UEPS stock alert, advisory sell Net 1 shares

I've been using Easypay to pay municipal and Telkom accounts for the past 13 years (since 1998). The company was an offshoot from Pick 'n Pay who always acknowledged themselves to be more of a financial institution than a retailer (they make money off the cash flow rather off the goods), and they had been accepting Telkom and municipal payments for many years prior to the online payment company Easypay was established. The Easypay website and system was simple and easy to use, one could save ones account details and login monthly (anytime) to make payments with ones credit card. It took a few minutes....

The website and systems worked flawlessly for more than 13 years... then some bright spark thought it must be upgraded and changed everything. The new site took about an hour to work out how it worked, one needed to call the support line in order to get it working, and finally the banks stopped allowing them to transaction (Both ABSA and FNB that I am aware of). Now they say on their site:

EasyPay's SOLUTION will launch in 26 days: As you are probably aware, a number of reports have been published in the press regarding Credit Card fraudsters targeting EasyPay's website. This led to ABSA, and other financial institutions erroneously suspending all credit card transactions processed through EasyPay's website. Some banks inferred or simply blamed EasyPay for the failure of their own Credit Card security systems. "We at EasyPay have always adhered to all the rules as imposed by the banks." 

Yes, Easypay you have always adhered to the banks rules and your new system failed because the users could not work it, and because your old system worked there is no wonder as to why the bad press is happening! It is so clear that Easypay are playing with words to try save face. We know that it's not fraud, it's the systems you built and changed to (which cause the people using it to revoke the payments they tried to make), since the new system is bad and customers revoked payments as they did not intend to make some that the system forced. I went through the whole process personally and I've spoken to others who had the same experiences.  

Now they say "EasyPay have considered the weaknesses of the current credit card security protocols, and will in the following weeks educate our users with regard to a newly patented system, developed by EasyPay's holding company, Net1 UEPS Technologies, Inc" 

Sad and disappointing from a consumer point of view, I can also see them spending heaps of money on even more systems development that will shed even more customers. I'm disappointed, Pick 'n Pay must have sold out... anyone know the best alternatives? 

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

Usability is a definite interest of mine, and something I'm passionate about including in any web project. Jakob says this year "many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be" and published his 10 top mistakes...

Keeping in mind that Jakob is an academic on usability and in reality usability experts can never be as good as the user (and hence real user testing is an important phase), he makes some interesting and important points. Search - does anyone not use Google? (Even Sekamo (a local version made through google co-op) counts as Google), PDF - is an interessting one... "Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks their flow". Good point, although publishers (and product pushers) want to 'leave behind' something for you to refer to. Hmm, worth keeping in mind. The rest, take a look on your own, I can't see anything glaring but definitely worth the scan.

Added 10 Jan: Keeping in mind that there are no hard rules, there are some exceptions to these 'mistakes', it's worth also seeing Vincent Flanders Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015