Eliminating Downtime For Your E-Commerce Store.
April 24, 2008
Keeping your website running isn’t the only technology concern for today’s small e-commerce businesses. Your customers rely on your ability to communicate with them via email, telephone, or fax. A failure in any one of a number of your infrastructure technology systems can disrupt your operations, keeping you from shipping orders, answering calls, taking orders, and processing credit cards.
System downtime has a cost well beyond the time you spend fixing the product. The total cost of a system outage includes increased labor cost to handle customer service concerns, lost revenue from refunded or cancelled orders, customer dissatisfaction, and the opportunity costs in spending your time not working on your business.
An e-commerce business’s critical infrastructure items include the telephone systems, Internet access, AC power, the website hosting, and basic application software used daily. The failure of any single component can disrupt operations, and impact your business.
If your Internet connection is down due to your DSL or cable provider system being unavailable, most of the typical e-commerce business’s systems grind to a halt. Without Internet access, you are unable to send or receive email, produce shipping documents, or receive orders from your storefront. Setting up a wireless Internet access system as a back up to your primary ISP is a cost effective way to reduce your system downtime.
Setting up your network to access multiple ISP services is becoming easier, and less expensive. Low cost intelligent routers which monitor the ISP connections, and automatically route connectivity to the service that is “up” are easy to install, and will keep your business up and running when your primary high speed connection goes 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.
In the event of a true disaster, the one item you need to make sure you have is a good back up. A truly good back up includes all your critical business files and records, not just for the website, but your financial, marketing, and operational data as well. Take your back-up files off site, at least weekly, to assure you’ve got your data safeguarded.
It is important that you test all your redundant, and back up systems periodically to make sure they are working. There is nothing worse than having a critical system outage and then find out your back-up systems aren’t working. Then you are attempting to fix TWO systems, not one. Keep the back-up and redundant systems operational when things are running well to make sure you can continue your business operations when a major outage occurs.
The benefits to your customers, your employees, and your own personal stress levels are significant. A business doing only $500,000 per year in business loses over $100 per business hour when operations are disrupted. The distraction can cost you even more by taking your time away from growing the business, to putting it onto fixing it. Every 1% of down time can cost you over $3,000, plus disrupt your life. Inexpensive investments in redundant and back-up systems can pay for themselves quickly, and easily.
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