| Eliminating Downtime For Your E-Commerce Store |
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| Contributed by Edward Cole | |
 eCommerce Business The true cost of downtime can be significant, and includes many things other than just lost revenue from lost orders. Increased (and expensive) customer service time, refunded and cancelled orders, loss of customer loyalty, and opportunity loss associated with handling the outage itself can be tremendously expensive. There are a variety of different infrastructure components that an e-commerce business relies on to operate including electrical power, Internet access, website hosting, email, and core software applications. If any one of these systems fails, the ability to serve your customers can be disrupted. Accessing the Internet from your business can often be the most critical potential failure points. Today's e-commerce business use the Internet to send or receive emails, receive orders from your storefront, and produce shipping labels. Typically, small e-commerce businesses rely on DSL or cable Internet services. There are inexpensive, high-performance wireless based back-up systems available for your business to use in the event of an outage of your primary Internet provider. When you have multiple ISP access points, you'll need to set-up your network to use both your primary and secondary services. Inexpensive, but powerful, routers can be configured to monitor the ISP access of your providers, and automatically route your Internet access via whatever service is up. This keeps your operations running without disruption, even if your DSL or cable is down. The newest Internet based toll free services offer a very creative solution to your inbound call handling needs. In addition to being very inexpensive, these systems can be set-up to route your inbound toll free calls to multiple different phone numbers. This way, if your landline is down, your customers can still reach you because your toll free service can route your calls to your VOIP or cellular phone number without disruption. In areas of the country where power is less reliable, you need to be creative in the set-up of your electrical systems. Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS's) can give you short-term back-up power, while assuring you have clean, spike free electricity flowing to your devices. Make sure all your critical equipment has a UPS including routers, modems, switches, phones, servers, and of course your PCs. To manage longer-term power outages, a back-up electrical generator is a must have piece of equipment. Inexpensive units are available at the local home center. Have an electrician wire up a generator transfer switch to your circuit panel to assure you can safely and quickly switch over to generator power in an outage. Test your system from time to time to make sure the generator starts with ease, and that you can switch over your circuits without disrupting the business. Most of us focus our energy on having a high availability host for our website and stores. The goal isn't just to make sure the site itself has high availability, but also all components that plug into the site. Make sure your payment processor's systems are equally high uptime for both the payment gateway, and the authorizing network. Should you be unfortunate enough to suffer a true catastrophic failure of your systems, you will need a back up of your business records and data files to get back up and running. It is vital you back-up your systems including your local PC, and take copy of your files off-site to a secure location at least once a week. The worst time to find out that one of your back-up systems isn't working is when your primary system fails. To keep your online store running well, test your back-up systems periodically, and perform required maintenance when things are running well. Trying to fix your back up systems when your primary system is down is a double whammy to your business. A carefully thought out set of investments in your infrastructure can make your life much less stressful, and can reap a good return on investment. An online store doing $500,000 in revenue per year risks over $100 per hour when business is incapacitated by a system outage. Only 1% of downtime per year can cost up to $3,000. When you consider that you may have ten critical systems, if each is 99.9% reliable, combined they are going to cost you 1%. Edward Cole's online baby shower party store has shipped thousands of orders. Edward is part of the management team at PartyPail.com, and he says that the rubber ducky baby shower is one of the most popular themes. Article Directory: Article Dashboard |
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