Is your store up and running?
Now?
How do you know?
This is Magento uptime revisited.
Even the big boys sometimes fall… actually, eBay crashed on me a couple of weeks back with a nasty, not-for-the-faint-of-heart screen showing the guts of their code.
This week, when I tried to access my Microsoft account (yes, I have one), I got a “service not available” message from the Redmond gang.
As someone who works for a company that specializes in finding site issues in online stores, I can’t say the fact that such issues happen actually surprises me. At Shoppimon, we see these issues in Magento shops all the time, some happening constantly – others, only every now and then – causing a store to lose customers without ever knowing why…
Shoppimon looks at more than a thousand online stores, and we have found that downtime for stores is actually higher than the desired industry standard and that many issues happen often & intermittently, making them harder to find.
So let’s look at uptime: the industry standard is set around 99.5%. Some hosting providers boast 99.9% uptime; but what does that mean? Well, it usually means that the server is up and running 99.5% of the time. It means that 99.5% of the time, you can reach it…you can ping it as the IT crowd would say. But does that mean the store is working?
Well…no.
How about your payment gateway? Is it reachable?
Eh, a simple ping isn’t looking at that.
And your product page or pages? Are your customers able to reach them? Or even find them? Or…you know…make a purchase?
Mmmmm…don’t know. That’s not part of the “uptime” test.
So for store owners who are interested in selling online, relying on uptime measurements is problematic to say the least. It’s like driving by the mall where your brick and mortar store is, seeing that the building is there, but moving on without checking to see that your store manager is there, that the door is open and the lights are on, and that products are on the shelves or that the cash register is working.
This is exactly what we do atShoppimon – we shop. We sendvirtual Shoppimonsters to check all aspects of your store to see that everything is functioning. If a page is inaccessible or a customer cannot complete a transaction, we report it immediately so you can fix it. To us, this is true uptime testing – is the store working? Or is it not? If a customer cannot complete a purchase or if products are inaccessible, the business is down. Simple, right?
Now…what’s the Shoppimon measurement for true e-commerce uptime? It’s a 96% average, with 14% of the stores scoring lower than 95% uptime.
Yeah, it aint pretty… one of those errors may be yours.
So what can you do about it? The first step is simply to be aware of these issues. Find out what happens, where, and when.
Is there a specific time when business outages tend to happen? Which ones are you seeing? Either set up your own mechanisms to automatically and continuously travel your store’s sales funnel…or register with Shoppimon for FREE, thorough, regular checkups.
Once issues are exposed and documented, it’s a lot easier to decide which to tackle and how. You’ll be armed with knowledge…and knowledge is power. Take control of your business, weed out site hiccups and business hoggers.
Reclaim your sales!
