The good news is that the United States Mint site, by all accounts, did not go down during the onslaught of traffic with the latest Morgan Dollar releases. The bad news is that the United States Mint site got a bit shaky at the height of the traffic storm. But it survived, relatively unscathed, and that is a far cry better than the site’s performance just three months ago.
As readers know, the Mint released the 2021-D and 2021-S Morgan Dollars yesterday at Noon Eastern. The demand for these coins honoring the 100th anniversary of the transition from the Morgan Dollar to the Peace Dollar has been exceptionally high. The Mint actually delayed these releases as it did bolstering work of its site over the early part of this summer. Yesterday was the truest test yet of if that work had paid off, even more so than the 2021-W American Eagle Type-2 Silver Proof from last week.
By monitoring Twitter, Reddit, and other channels, it does not appear that anyone dealt with a true crash of the Mint’s site or significant delays due to the anti-BOT technology it has deployed. Some users did complain of the site being slower than normal but not unavailable. By far the biggest complaint was around the checkout process where users were having to wait several minutes in some cases to see if their orders had gone through. That caused more than a few anxious moments for buyers.
Does this mean that the Mint has finally made the improvements to its site to withstand heavy traffic on high demand products? It would seem to be the case. There does appear to be room for improvement around the shopping cart experience and perhaps that needs to be investigated by the Mint. But given the fact that both the 2021-D and 2021-S Morgans sold out within minutes and there was not “rage Tweeting” going on in the process, take it as a win.
Well done United States Mint.
Hi, Did David J Ryder write this article? I’m sorry, but the Mint’s latest Morgan release was the worst ever. And it’s not just me saying that: just google articles about the latest Morgan release and read the comments. 2 people say they breezed through and 50 report the same problems of the “prove your human”, then “page not found”, then “Bad Gateway”, then “3 digit security code is wrong (when it really isn’t)” then “bad credit card data – please use another card or contact your institution”. All of those errors and more, over and over again.
I and 4 other friends were all messaging each other on Whatsapp and although we were in different states and had different ISP’s, we all had these same errors. There were 5 of us and three were unable to order due to endless errors. I myself was able to order after 23 minutes of constantly proving I was a human and then filling the order form credit card info over, and over, and over again – probably about 30 times.
When I looked at my credit card details online I saw that the US Mint had made 5 pre-authorization charges of $530.95 from where it failed to complete the transaction numerous times.
It’s a wonder that no one else has commented , or perhaps they did and got deleted. I think you should ask around and read up on this last release before declaring the problem fixed – Because it isn’t. The LAST thing that we want to do is tell the US Mint “Good Job” because the website is nowhere near able to handle the traffic and needs someone else to overhaul it.