The hidden costs of eCommerce downtime and how to prevent it this holiday season
For merchants of all sizes, the holiday shopping season is one of the most important times of the year. Just last year stores on the Shopify platform generated a total of $6.3 billion dollars in global sales across 47 million stores – that’s a 23% increase from 2020!
With holiday shopping starting earlier each year, it’s never been more important to prepare your store for a long haul of increased traffic and sales. Luckily, eCommerce platforms like Shopify are built to scale effectively with this increase in demand, with fairly little downtime experienced throughout the year.
However, where we often see stores experience the most amount of downtime and lost revenue during this time is through changes to the online store itself. These changes can often seem minor, whether it’s changing a product template in the Shopify admin, or installing a third-party app, but they can often lead to breaking changes that go unnoticed, leading to $10s-$100s of thousands of dollars in lost sales.
Have you set up the proper tools to prevent downtime on your online store this holiday season? Read on to learn more about eCommerce downtime and actionable ways you can prevent it on your store.
What is downtime and how is it caused?
When most business owners describe downtime, they are normally thinking about their website being completely inaccessible to customers. This is generally caused by the hosting platform the eCommerce website is built on having a server outage.
The reality though, is that most eCommerce platforms, like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, etc, offer quite high levels of uptime availability. Most promise a 99.99% uptime, which equates to roughly 45 minutes of Shopify downtime each year. This is what we’d consider hard downtime, which in our opinion is the type of downtime you need to worry about the least. Ecommerce platforms invest millions of dollars into their infrastructure, for example, Shopify routinely scales to support stores doing thousands of orders per minute like Kylie Costmetics, or Gymshark. Unless you’re self-hosting your eCommerce website, with platforms like Magento where version upgrades are required, you should worry less about Shopify uptime, and more about soft downtime.
Soft downtime refers to issues on your online store that impact the customer experience, leading to a loss in sales. The difference here is that unlike hard downtime, where your store cannot be accessed at all and the impact is immediately apparent, soft downtime generally goes unnoticed but can have a large impact on customer experience, store performance, and sales.
How does soft downtime happen?
An eCommerce website is like a growing organism, it starts out fairly simple and over time becomes increasingly complex. Complexity, caused by the introduction of new features, technologies, or third-party applications, can lead to issues and broken functionality. It can become a game of whack-a-mole, where fixing or changing one thing causes an unexpected impact somewhere else on the website.
The most common time where these sorts of issues are introduced is during theme changes – which can be as simple as updating a product page template in the Shopify Admin. At Uptime, we see Shopify Plus merchants update their themes as many as 700 times on average per month. With that many theme changes, there’s a lot of potential for accidentally breaking functionality on the online store without realizing it.
Cost of downtime
Downtime, hard or soft, can have a large impact on your business beyond just a temporary loss in sales.
Here are some of the obvious and hidden downtime costs:
Lost revenue
The most obvious one is lost revenue – if customers can’t access your store, or if your add to cart buttons are broken, then customers can’t purchase, leading to a loss of revenue.
We’ve seen countless examples of merchants losing $10s-$100s of thousands of dollars due to store issues that go unnoticed for long periods of time. For example, Natural Patch released a theme update that caused website content between the header and footer to not appear on a separate area of the website – this was not immediately apparent to the team and was only discovered much later, once a five-figure amount of revenue was already lost.
Check out our eCommerce-focused downtime cost calculator to understand how much downtime will cost you this year.
Churned customers
Customers' attention spans are limited and research shows that after just one bad experience 32% of customers will never return. That means your lost revenue is additionally compounded by a loss in recurring customers.
Wasted ad spend
Most eCommerce brands are spending a large percentage of their revenue on paid ads on Facebook, Google search, Tiktok, etc. When issues arise on your online store, this paid ad traffic becomes wasted, driving interested customers to a broken experience.
Reduced SEO ranking
Broken pages and online store functionality can cause high bounce rates, which can lead to a reduction in your store's Google search ranking.
Low converting email/SMS sends
Similar to wasted ad spend, when merchants are unaware of soft downtime they will continue sending email and SMS marketing campaigns, driving customers to a potentially broken website.
Practical tips for preventing downtime
Preventing downtime, or at least lessening the impact of downtime, on your business is simple as long as you have the proper systems in place. There may be downtime that feels unavoidable like a platform outage, however, we like to say that knowledge is power, and being aware of downtime events allows you to take the necessary actions to reduce the overall impact of downtime.
As we head into the 2022 Black Friday and holiday season, we wanted to share our list of the top 7 ways to prevent downtime on your online store:
1. Performance monitoring
Site and page load speed is critical for any eCommerce store, for example, Walmart saw a 2% conversion rate increase for every 1 second of site speed improvement. Merchants can monitor their site performance via tools like Google Lighthouse, or directly within the Shopify Admin via the ‘Online store speed’ tool. This report should be monitored consistently over time to watch for sudden increases, signaling an issue that should be addressed.
2. Code freeze
Performing a code freeze before high traffic and revenue periods like the Black Friday/holiday season is common for most merchants and even the Shopify platform. This is a set period of time in which no changes are made to the online store. By freezing code changes you reduce the likelihood of introducing new bugs or issues to your online store.
3. eCommerce website testing
Online stores can become complex, making them difficult to fully test before a big launch – we often see merchants' approach to eCommerce testing is to have a few customer journeys they’ll test before a big release but are often unaware of live issues occurring on other pages.
It’s easy to put QA testing on autopilot with tools like Uptime, where you can simply record specific customer journeys that test core store functionality (add to cart, upsells, proceed to checkout, etc.), and the Shopify app will test them every time there’s an update to your theme, alerting you the moment there’s an issue. Think of it as your own personal team of Shopify QA testers.
Additionally, for manual website testing, it can be helpful to invest the time in building a thorough website QA checklist, also known as a website testing plan. This plan should include a detailed list of test cases that need to be checked before a new theme or website change goes live – ensuring that all core functionality and customer journeys are tested. Here’s a guide on how to create an eCommerce website testing checklist.
4. Launch scheduling
To deliver a smooth transition for a feature or product release, it can be helpful to use a tool like Shopify’s Launchpad. A tool like this allows you to simplify execution through automation, and monitor your launches in real-time to ensure everything is working correctly.
5. Store backups
If the worst case occurs, and you release a change to your online store that breaks core functionality, using a theme backup app like Rewind can save you a lot of time and money. Backup apps work in the background, ensuring all your online store data is saved so you can revert to an old working theme file if things break on your live theme.
6. Create a staging theme
Testing online store changes on a live theme can be dangerous, as the changes may introduce bugs that will impact real customers. That’s why it’s best to test theme changes on a Shopify test site, also known as a staging theme.
You can create a staging theme by simply clicking the ‘Actions’ button on your live theme and selecting the ‘Duplicate’ button. Once duplicated, the new staging theme will appear below in your ‘Theme library’ list, where you can begin to customize the theme and make changes in a safe environment that will not impact real customers. When you’re happy with the changes, simply click the ‘Actions’ button on the staging theme and select the ‘Publish’ button.
For more information, check out this Shopify community post, or use an app like Rewind Staging.
7. Monitor the Shopify status page
As we mentioned above, hard downtime is rare but can happen from time to time. To stay on top of platform status changes it’s a good idea to monitor the status pages of the services you use. This could include the Shopify platform status page or even the status pages of third-party apps you use. Luckily, there are tools like Uptime that will monitor these status pages for you in real-time, and alert you the moment these platforms have an outage – making Shopify and third-party app monitoring easy and automated.
Top Shopify apps for monitoring and managing downtime on your online store
For Shopify merchants, the app store has a number of apps that can support merchants in monitoring their online store for issues. Here’s a list of some of our top recommendations for apps to monitor your store:
Uptime
With Uptime you'll get proactive alerts about issues on your online store, saving you valuable time, money, and headache. The app monitors your online store through automated QA test flows that simulate real customer interactions, and detects outages on the Shopify status page and third-party apps. If there's an issue you'll get alerts in real-time via email or Slack.
Rewind Backups
Easily backup your Shopify store so you can undo unwanted changes any time with Rewind. Get peace of mind knowing that your most important store data is automatically backed up. Every day, Rewind backs up products, themes, and other critical data for merchants of all sizes. We're the only backup app in the Shopify Plus Certified App Program.
Rewind Staging
Rewind Staging is built for Shopify merchants who want to maintain a staging environment in Shopify to test changes before pushing them to their live store.
Start preparing for the 2022 holiday season today
There’s no better time to start preparing for the Black Friday & holiday season than right now. The earlier you start, the more prepared you’ll be to handle any store issues or hard downtime that may occur.
We hope this post shows you that testing eCommerce shouldn’t be hard or time-consuming. Once the process is set up, it should feel like second nature every time you release a new update to your online store. This process and the app recommendations we shared should give you peace of mind knowing that your online store is protected and mitigated from a downtime event.
