Uptime 2023 Year In Review
Uptime has come a long way since our last year in review. Since then we've scaled the platform to support some of the largest merchants on the Shopify platform, released tons of new features, and most importantly, helped merchants detect countless issues that would've otherwise led to substantial loss in sales.
Let's dig into a full year of Uptime data – keep in mind, since last year Uptime was only live for about 9 months, any comparisons listed below will be compared to that same 9 month period (roughly April to December):
Overall
It was a busy year for the Uptime team – with our total installs growing by 149% we were onboarding new merchants constantly, which is a great problem to have! Through our growth we got the opportunity to work with some of the largest merchants on the Shopify platform (and some of our favorites)!
We were also hard at work listening to our customers and releasing their most requested features. Here's a sample of what we released in Uptime this past year:
Oh, and one more thing – we were acquired by WeCommerce! Through the acquisition this past October, we joined Pixel Union, one of the original Shopify theme developers, and owner of the popular Theme Updater Plus app. We've got big plans for 2024, so stay tuned!
Partnering with Uptime means our clients no longer have to worry about missing an outage and losing out on business because something isn’t working on the backend of their online stores. Automating test flows means we can use our time more strategically, ensuring we can deliver the best possible site experience and drive users to convert instead of wasting time on inefficient manual testing.
– Jeff Herrera, VP of Marketing and Partnerships @ Wpromote
Shopify outages
As we mentioned in our hidden costs of eCommerce downtime blog post, eCommerce platforms like Shopify maintain high levels of availability, and in comparison to issues caused by human error or theme updates (which you'll see below we detected ~105K issues this year), Shopify downtime is something you should worry about the least. It's also important to note that not all Shopify downtime events impact all merchants, as these events are often localized.
Through tracking outages reported on the Shopify Status page throughout the year, we detected a total of ~170 unique incidents – that's a 30% increase in comparison to last year, or about 14 incidents per month (!).
Similar to last year, the top 3 Shopify services by number of outages were Admin, Checkout, and Storefront. This year we saw an increase in outages across the board, with Storefront seeing the largest increase of 180% in comparison to last year.
Since Uptime monitors the Shopify status page in realtime, we kept merchants in the loop the moment all of these incidents were reported on the Shopify status page.
Make sure to check out this blog post to learn how Uptime was able to alert merchants to a Shopify checkout outage hours before Shopify reported it!
Uptime gives our leadership team the peace of mind needed to ensure the website customer journey is uninterrupted. The Slack notifications of app/Shopify outages are also very convenient!
– Joseph Zeuner, Senior Manager of Ecommerce Operations @ Nili Lotan
Third party Shopify app outages
Uptime allows merchants to monitor the status pages of some of the most used third party apps on the Shopify App Store. In fact, Uptime now monitors over 20 of the most used Shopify apps on the App Store
This year Uptime reported over 505 outages from third party Shopify apps (a comparable 57% increase from last year). If you added up the duration between all of our detected outage start time and resolved times, it would total over 3.9K hours (that's a 160% increase from last year).
Klaviyo takes the prize again this year as the top most monitored Shopify app in Uptime. There was also some movement for the remaining spots, with Rebuy jumping up 2 spots to take second place, and Gorgias and Recharge both dropping down one spot each.
Uptime helps us have peace of mind that our most important customer journeys are working as intended. Our checkout upsells stopped working recently, and Uptime immediately alerted us to make a fix.
– Ryan Truitt, Senior Product Manager @ Bonafide
Automated test flows
This year, Uptime merchant's created over 1,171 automated UI test flows! These automated test flows tested merchants store functionality over 520,000 times (a 180% increase from last year) – that's almost 10,000 hours of testing! And according to Malcolm Gladwell, that means we have officially reached the "magic number of greatness" – I guess we're automated testing experts now!
With increased testing, comes increased failure detection – which in 2023 Uptime reported over 85,000 test flow failures (a 168% increase from last year).
Uptime has become a lifeline for us. It's the off-site app we were dreaming of, monitoring our pages and website flow with precision. It's liberated us from the constant worry about our site's health and allowed us to channel our energy into growing our business.
– Shane, Founder @ Prime Party
Get some peace of mind in 2023
Uptime’s goal is to give you peace of mind knowing someone is always monitoring your online store. Make sure to read some of our case studies to see how other merchants have gained peace of mind with Uptime.
If your team wants to get started with automated online store monitoring, install the app now for free or book time with us and we can help you get started!
