With our simple ecommerce downtime calculator, you can quickly determine exactly how much revenue you’re likely to lose when your store stops working unexpectedly.
After all, every moment your store isn’t up and running as it should be, you’re missing out on potential revenue. To make matters worse, too much sudden downtime could cause damage to your reputation, making shoppers less likely to trust you in the future.
Calculating the impact of downtime can be complex without a little help. After all, there are numerous factors that can contribute to how much money you may lose. Fortunately, our calculator eliminates the hard work, making it easier to see exactly how detrimental downtime can be to your store.
Ecommerce Downtime Calculator
Our ecommerce downtime calculator is extremely easy to use. All you need to do is enter a few details about your online store to get started. Use the sliders to tell us what your average conversion rate typically looks like, how much traffic you receive each month, and what your average order value looks like. Then, enter how much downtime your store has faced.
Our intelligent algorithm will automatically calculate a figure showcasing how much you’re likely to lose for as little as 10 minutes of unexpected downtime.
What Is Ecommerce Downtime?
Ecommerce downtime is the term used to refer to instances when your store stops functioning as its supposed to. If your pages aren’t loading, your checkout stops working, and customers can’t place orders, then you’re encountering a period of downtime.
Even with the best online store builder and hosting provider available, any store can be subject to unexpected downtime. Servers responsible for running your store and ensuring customers can access your pages can unexpectedly stop working for a host of reasons.
The longer your store ceases to operate, the more detrimental downtime can be to your business. However, even when your store stops working for a short period, like 10-30 minutes, you can end up losing hundreds, or thousands of dollars in revenue. Add that initial loss to the damage caused to your reputation, and you could encounter serious problems.
What Causes Downtime?
There are a few factors that can contribute to downtime. The three most common culprits of a problematic online store include:
- Human error: Around 90% of data breaches, and countless other online store issues are caused by human error. Something as simple as making a basic change to your store’s theme or page design could stop the code from working as intended.
- Software glitches: Many common issues with downtime are simply caused by problems with software not working as its intended. Apps, add-ons, plugins, and even the software used to build your online store can all fail to work properly, causing your store to stop functioning.
- Malicious attacks: Hackers and other criminals may attempt to damage your store’s performance deliberately. If a hacker tries to access your store, they could prevent it from working for a host of different reasons. Someone could even delete your entire product list, or try to change the functionality of your checkout page.
How to Calculate the Cost of Downtime
The easiest way to calculate the cost of downtime is to use the calculator we’ve created above. We designed our calculator to make it as simple as possible for anyone to quickly determine how much revenue they’re losing from downtime.
For the most part, understanding the cost of downtime means thinking about the tangible and intangible costs of a non-operational store. From a tangible perspective, the biggest losses facing your online store when you encounter downtime are lost revenue, and the cost of recovery.
Every moment your store isn’t running, you’re missing out on potential orders. Additionally, if your store’s functionality is damaged in some way, you’ll need to spend time and money on getting it back up and operational again. Intangible costs can be a little more complex to calculate, but it might be worth thinking about:
- Lost customers and damaged reputation: Whenever your website stops operating as its supposed to, the experience you give your target audience is damaged. No matter what kind of product you sell, your customers will expect a fantastic experience on your store. If you don’t deliver according to those expectations, your audience may take their custom elsewhere.
- Productivity and opportunity costs: During a period of downtime, the people in your team will need to stop working on anything else they may be responsible for to function on fixing your website. Your team members may stop dealing with support requests, fixing other issues, or working on new products, which harms your potential income long-term.
- SEO issues: Downtime can also harm your SEO rankings, by influencing how people interact with your store. If customers click onto your website than hit the “back” button straight after, this will increase your bounce rate. It also reduces how long people actively spend on your website, which could lead to a loss in rankings.
How to Minimize Downtime
Some issues with downtime are impossible to prevent. Purchasing hosting from a provider with a strong “uptime guarantee” is usually a good idea. It’s also worth making sure you build your store on a platform that has strong servers, to minimize the risk of downtime. Other ways to minimize your chances of downtime include:
- Have a backup and recovery system in place: Ensuring you have a good backup system in place is one of the best ways to ensure your site can immediately bounce back from any issues. You’ll be able to create backups on most online store builders, either using the built-in functionality on your ecommerce platform, or by leveraging an add-on or plugin.
- Keep your domain and hosting up-to-date: No matter what, make sure you’re able to consistently pay for the hosting you use on your site, and your domain name. Setting up an auto-renewing subscription will minimize the risk of downtime caused by human error.
- Pay consistently for your ecommerce services: Similarly, it’s important to ensure you can pay for your website building platform on a consistent basis. If you don’t pay your monthly fee, your platform builder will stop working as its supposed to. Make sure you set up automatic payments for any sites like Shopify, Wix, or BigCommerce.
The most important thing you can do is ensure you’re ready to get your store back up and running as quickly as possible with a full back-up, whenever something goes wrong.
