Keeping Critical Systems Up 99.9% of the Time - Ecommerce

(this article is part of a series)

(This article is generally geared towards users of hosted ecommerce solutions such as those provided by Plimus, Yahoo! or Digital River. It still may be of some interest to webmasters fully handling their own ecommerce.)

First I have to admit that the title of this article isn't really accurate. While the strategies described in the other articles in this series can leave you reasonably confident of obtaining 99.9% uptime for your website and email - I don't have ready answers of how to get that degree of reliability with ecommerce.

A better title for this article might be:

How not to get screwed if your ecommerce provider starts having serious problems

You email your ecommerce provider's support, but four hours pass and you don't hear back.

Your ecommerce provider is having some kind of serious problem.

Ecommerce is very difficult to effectively monitor
It would be nice to know the instant your ecommerce provider starts having issues. Unfortunately, setting up a system to monitor ecommerce poses some problems.

Monitoring your provider's web server is a start. If the server itself is offline, sales aren't going to go through. But does the purchase form really work? Is the credit card processor online? Even if you could, trying to place an automated test order every 15 minutes is going to create more problems than it solves.

If you're a large enough operation to have a custom-developed ecommerce system hosted in-house with a 24 hour IT staff to support it - the story changes. Obviously, large-scale operations like Amazon are able to monitor their own systems comprehensively.

However, for the small online business owner, monitoring that your provider's web server is online in addition to just "keeping an eye on things" may be the best answer.

Have a backup provider - and be able to switch to them
There are monetary and time costs needed to setup a backup ecommerce provider. It's reasonable that some smaller businesses may deem it not to be worth the effort.

Try to avoid selecting a provider that charges "maintenance" or "hosting" fees just to maintain your account. Also consider if the provider is owned by the same parent company as your existing provider. If the entire company is experiencing problems, both providers might go offline - which defeats the purpose of having a backup.

Actually switching to your secondary provider may have additional ramifications. The more products your site contains, the more complex the switch-over operation may be. Try to figure out what the issues will be ahead of time. I don't recommend switching over to your backup if your existing provider just has a minor hiccup for a few minutes.

If you're selling a software application with a "Purchase" button - be sure to have it link to a page on your website that you can easily update with whoever your current ecommerce provider is. This also applies for any purchase links located on external websites.

The page itself can be an automated redirect over to your current provider (here's an example). For that matter, using the redirect page for any purchase links within your website can help simplify switching ecommerce providers should it become necessary. In the best case, you may need to only update the code for the redirect to switch between providers.

PayPal - some cheap and easy insurance
A few months ago SpamButcher started offering PayPal as a secondary purchasing option. Some users really prefer to pay with PayPal - and we can probably thank it for at least some of our recent sales gains.

PayPal has its problems - but it's easy to setup, has low fees and doesn't have any recurring expenses.

I've also seen circumstantial claims that people without PayPal accounts don't like being forced to use PayPal (even though an account isn't needed). Going 100% PayPal 100% of the time probably isn't the best idea.

However, if your main ecommerce provider is offline, temporarily pushing all users to PayPal offers an easy backup plan. You might lose a few non-PayPal customers - but that's certainly a lot better than losing all your sales.

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