Imagine you have just launched a new product. It’s exciting. It’s a big deal with your customers on social media. It is possible to see every dollar sign in your future.

It all ends in a halt because your site isn’t able to handle the additional traffic.

There are few things worse than discovering that your online shop has stopped loading suddenly or that your sales have dropped to zero. Your site may fail during peak season and you could lose a quarter or even a third of your annual revenue.

It’s easy to assume site uptime is a given. Site reliability and how to stop them from collapsing are not things we often think about. This guide will help you understand all of these issues. We will discuss the most common reasons for eCommerce site failures and how Wix can protect your business from being sold’s worst nightmare.

The true cost to eCommerce of downtime

It is important to remember that website malfunctions can have both short-term and longer-term consequences. Some of these effects are obvious while others are less apparent.

One of the most obvious is that a site failure can cause severe sales losses. Gartner estimates that $5,600 is lost every minute a site goes down. Gartner points out that this is an average. Businesses with larger revenues may lose tens to thousands of dollars per minute due to downtime. This could increase even further during peak shopping seasons.

Laurent Vasilescu, Macquarie analyst, said that a three-day outage at Lululemon would result in a penny per share of earnings.

Vasilescu explained to Financial Post that “Another way of looking at it is that each day that the website goes down, the company’s total company comp for the day is likely to be down double-digits.”

Site crashes can cause:

• Losing trust – Building brand trust depends on a great customer experience. Customers shouldn’t worry about payment, product availability, or professionalism. If your website is unstable, customers will abandon you in favor of a larger, more respected brand.
• Your customers speak. A damaged brand reputation. A site’s failure can spread quickly, regardless of whether it is a customer complaint or media coverage. These complaints and news stories can continue for many years. If the first headline of a site crash is what new shoppers see, it could give them a negative impression.

Wix identifies 7 reasons eCommerce sites can crash.

Although site failure can be devastating, many sellers do not prioritize reliability when choosing an eCommerce solution. Some sites can’t withstand millions, let alone thousands of shoppers at once. Your site must work harder behind the scenes for every transaction or visitor.

However, we believe that reliability shouldn’t be an issue. Your eCommerce platform is responsible for this. Wix was designed to adapt to the many situations that can put a strain on your website. These situations are:

01. Flash sales

Many eCommerce marketing plans are sold in flash sales, especially during the holidays. Cotsco was actually one of the hopeful merchants.

Costco was preparing for the annual Black Friday shopping spree in the days before the season. It was not to be. The website crashed on Thanksgiving Day. Costco.com experienced several performance problems for 16 hours, much to the company’s dismay. By the estimation of one analyst, Costco had lost almost $11 million in preBlack Friday sales.

You need to have inventory and campaign planning in order to prepare for a flash sales. Your hard work could be wasted if your website is slow-loading or has other problems.

The Wix Fix

Traditional sellers had to contact a developer in order to fix pagespeed issues, site hosting limitations, CDN configuration and other issues. The Wix eCommerce platform takes care of everything. Wix is a fully managed infrastructure that offers low-maintenance reliability. You don’t need to worry about site maintenance or setup. Your store can benefit from multi-cloud hosting, browser compatibility adjustments and other services.

02. Influencers and viral discount code

Your influencer marketing program can take off in an instant. An influencer might stumble across your products and create a buzz. As an example, think back to 2018. Just minutes after Meghan Markle was photographed in one of their dresses, fashion brand goat suffered a website crash.

Affiliate marketing campaigns may have the same effect. A blogger might write about your product, and then promote 25% of your product through an affiliate link. An affiliate can use Reddit to draw attention and generate traffic.

The Wix Fix

 

Wix’s autoscale infrastructure means that your site will not be affected by virality if your product becomes a huge success. Our system shifts user traffic automatically to handle additional visitors and transactions to your site – up to hundreds of millions per minute and 750 transactions every second to be exact.

03. Launches of new products

Product launches are the perfect opportunity for some of the most powerful PR, marketing and sales campaigns. Some products, such as video games, can be launched months before their official launch.

This was true for the PlayStation 5. Sony stated that it would accept pre-orders to purchase the PlayStation 5. Target and Best Buy followed Sony’s lead, except that they began accepting pre-orders one day earlier than Sony.

There was a huge rush to order the PS5 and lots of “access denied!” messages. The Verge reports that even in cases where shoppers could access the site, many encountered problems during transactions.

Bots could have been partly to blame. Some customers may have used “creative” methods to refresh their screens repeatedly until the PS5 stopped working. Online stores that aren’t well prepared can make product launches a disappointment, despite all the excitement.

The Wix Fix

Wix boasts 99.9% uptime. Our platform’s resilient, advanced technology makes this possible. No matter how many visitors your store receives, it can continue to operate as normal. You can switch payment providers as needed by integrating with more than 50 payment service providers.

04. Special campaigns and donations

Even the most well-intentioned campaign, such as one that aims to increase social awareness, can cause site problems. It is important to be aware of any potential vulnerabilities before participating in “cause marketing.”

These types of campaigns not only generate tons of traffic but can also cause large-sum donations (or spikes in transactions). People shouldn’t become frustrated by slow-loading pages and other site interruptions while trying to support your cause.

The Wix Fix

Our autoscale infrastructure allows unlimited scaling, as we mentioned previously. Wix ensures that your website pages run smoothly from the moment your store is launched to the moment your first million sales are made.

05. Site updates that are poorly planned

Every website needs to be updated or maintained from time-to-time. Sometimes, even the smallest code error can cause a site to crash. Open-source platforms that rely on many plugins and extensions can cause problems if the code is changed. If you are in the middle or high-sales season, these could all spell disaster.

The Wix Fix

Wix is “always online.” This means that your site will never go down due to backend maintenance, provisioning or complex setup. It is best to save the parts that you are planning on redesigning for slow seasons if you or your team are planning to do so independently. It’s not a good idea to change button placements and other page settings as shoppers flood your site.

06. Malicious attacks and hackers

 

The internet is full of bad actors. DDoS attacks can be automated and attack sites randomly. Most hackers don’t care about the size of your business. 43% of cyberattacks target small businesses. It’s difficult to recover for small businesses, especially if customers become aware of the security breach.

The Wix Fix

Double-shielding is provided for every Wix store to protect it from DDoS attacks, which attempt to overwhelm your site by generating fake traffic. Wix combines the best reliability with website security technology, so your data is always safe and you are never hacked.

07. Miscellaneous hiccups

Other issues could also arise: Web hosting issues. Server errors. A domain that is no longer available. You may have to use an eCommerce platform. Some platforms limit the amount of sales you can make in a given time period.

The Wix Fix

Wix doesn’t restrict your sales. That’s against our beliefs. We believe you should have all the benefits of running an online shop, current and future, regardless of what eCommerce plan your company has. Our all-in one infrastructure will save you time and money by eliminating the risks most site owners (read non-Wix users).

Wix can help you crash-proof your website today

A strong, dynamic infrastructure is key to preventing site crashes. You might be wondering, “Aren’t all site builders pretty much alike?” This is a common misconception. In reality, however, there is a lot of variation between systems. There’s even more below the surface that can help keep your site running. Site reliability is a top priority at Wix. Wix is pretty close to being 100% reliable, even though no system is perfect.

Summary of Wix Benefits

• Unfazed reliability (99.58% uptime)
• Autoscale infrastructure
• Disaster recovery automatically
• Multi-cloud hosting
• DDoS protection
• No tech or maintenance skills are required

source https://www.wix.com/blog/ecommerce/2022/03/ecommerce-site-crash