Keeping Your Online Store Up & Running - System Outage Planning | E-Commerce

By EdwardCole
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Small e-commerce businesses need to focus on keeping all their systems live, not just their website. Customers expect, and need, to be able to communicate with you via telephone, email, fax, and other methods. Since today's systems are so tightly integrated, a failure in a single piece of your infrastructure can interrupt your ability to talk to clients, ship orders, process transactions, and keep customers happy.

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.

The major points of failure, where your ability to service clients can be impacted, includes you website hosting, telephone systems, ISP access, email, core application software systems, and electrical power. A failure in any single one of these core infrastructure components can impact your ability to properly serve your customers.

One of the biggest failure potential points is your ISP access point. If your connection to the Internet is down, you can't send or receive email, monitor your store for orders, or generate shipping documents. Most small e-commerce businesses rely on DSL or cable Internet services. An inexpensive back-up option exists for both. Inexpensive high-speed wireless Internet access is becoming more commonly available.

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.

An inexpensive solution for longer-term power outages is to have a back-up generator available onsite. You can pick-up an inexpensive generator at your local home center, and you can have an electrician install a basic generator connection switch to your circuit panel. In the event of a power outage, you can start-up your generator, plug it into the generator transfer switch, and flip a couple switches, and all your systems can be operating. Make sure you test this system occasionally to make sure your generator starts easily, and that you have configured you switch on the proper circuits.

Most online stores are hosted at reliable web hosts. One of the most critical integration items it to make sure your payment processing system is equally reliable. It doesn't do any good to have a reliable website that can't process a credit card when a customer makes a purchase.

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.

Testing your systems everyone once in a white (say quarterly) is a prudent way to make sure you systems will run well when needed. There is nothing worse that having a critical system outage, and then having your back up not work either. In that situation, you have to fix two systems, not just one. The disruption to your e-commerce store can be significant in this situation.

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%.

About the Author

Edward Cole's Internet baby shower decoration store has shipped thousands of orders. Edward is writer and manager for at PartyPail.com, and he says that the Radio Flyer baby shower is one of the most popular themes.

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