Thanks Lawrence for your investigations. I had a response from PageVille in due course and sent them this email:

"G’day Bob,

I had a touch of panic there for bit, as every time I went to the shopping cart, it said it was busy. This went on for a few days and had me trying to verify if PageVille was legit or what. Hence the email to you – I have been working on getting my website and business off the ground for months, and to have this killer problem one week before launch date was just too much for a country boy to handle.

Then I had a thought – perhaps it is because I have not added any inventory items in the cart yet that is causing the problem. So after putting in an item and clicking on the buy button for that item, it went through to the cart, finally. Yes!! After that, I could check the cart and it came up OK, as long as there was an item to purchase in it. I then cleared the cart and clicked to go to the cart without a buy item in it and it always comes up with the “busy due to high volume” message, even now.

So, the only real problem is that it is not coming back with the correct message when you try to go to the checkout/cart when nothing is in there. It should read “YOU HAVE NO ITEMS IN YOUR CART”, not that it is “busy due to high volume”, as customers will not go any further and click a ‘buy’ button, because they have just been told the cart is not working.

I have also realised that you guys are asleep when I’m awake, being on the other side of the planet, so communication is going to be a bit drawn out. I do appreciate that you have gotten back to me on this. I think that the simple stripped-down concept of the PageVille cart is great, and I will send you through my suggestions for a few tweaks at some point, when I’m not so busy."

So things are not as bad as I thought. Will keep you updated.

Cheers, Max.