How Downtime Can Threaten Your Sales
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Ron Gyst is a blogger, author and design enthusiast. In addition to writing about building business online, Ron is also a freelance graphic designer with 8 years of experience in this field. |
The online sales market continues to demonstrate stable growth. Given the high availability of web building tools and platforms like CS-Cart, this market still has a long way to go to reach the top. Buying and selling goods and services online offer tons of convenient options for both online store owners and clients.
The growth of the world hosting service market has resulted in the appearance of numerous hosting services. They utilize equipment and software that keeps websites ticking. Clients are interested in signing up with reputable and conscientious services, who operate nonstop. Uptime and downtime are number one criteria of the quality of service.
There are versatile pieces of user-friendly self-hosted shopping software like CS-Cart and CS-Cart Vendor. These are feature-rich online store and marketplace builders installed on a server and aimed to help create an e-shop. Users can download it on their devices and benefit from numerous functions and options. Such software as CS-Car is tuned specifically for e-commerce and allow online store owners to run their business with nothing but a tablet in their hands. They continue to do well until there is a downtime. Once it comes, the business stops and hard times begin.
What Is Uptime/Downtime?
In relation to web hosting, uptime denotes the time when the service’s equipment is operational. For online salespersons, it means that their websites are running, and they continue to earn money. Downtime is the time when these systems stop working. At these moments, every time a user tries to buy a good thing at his or her favorite online store, he or she sees the disappointing “error” message with a promise to resume work ASAP.
Unfortunately, this is something that cannot be avoided completely, and companies report average weekly downtime of about 1.5 hours or so. Consequences of downtime are measured not only in hours or days missed. Downtime puts at risk such crucial factors of successful business as:
- Reputation. On such occasions, users vent their rage in social media, and their feelings become known in less than a few hours. Even a brief downtime can stain a company’s reputation indelibly;
- Customer satisfaction level. Once it happens, customers feel disappointed. Business is always in a hurry and won’t wait for a better day because customers look elsewhere immediately;
- Productivity. Downtime puts the staff out of work. The scale of loss can be calculated by multiplying the number of employees by the number of work hours per day. For example, a whole-day downtime for a company hiring 100 employees will result in 800 work hours going down the drain;
- Financial loss. This is last, but not least. According to estimates, every hour of downtime causes an average company to lose around $100,000 per hour!
If downtime is brief, it will not stop sales, and most customers will wait patiently until the website resumes its work. However, serious technical issues can slow down a company for several days. This can put even a very successful business at risk of total devastation. There is a higher risk of lawsuits due to financial losses related to crumbed deals, missed deadlines, poor delivery of money, etc.
Be Ready All the Time
Because there is nothing to guarantee 100% protection against downtime, businesses should prepare a safety cushion and be ready to face it any time. Ranking systems suggest that even top hosting services demonstrate some downtime, and there is no company showing a 100% uptime. It means that there will be moments of dissatisfaction and disappointment anyway.
In light of this, it is advisable to use these services when choosing a hosting service and rely on downtime/uptime—crucial criteria of a company’s integrity.
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Yan Anderson is the Head of Content Marketing at CS-Cart with over 10 years of experience in the eCommerce industry. He's passionate about explaining complicated things in simple terms. Yan has expertise in building, running and growing eCommerce marketplaces. He loves to educate people about best practices, new technologies, and trends in the global eCommerce industry.