Zen Of Internet Marketing

Keeping your website running isn’t the only technology concern for today’s small e-commerce businesses. Your customers rely on your ability to communicate with them via email, telephone, or fax. A failure in any one of a number of your infrastructure technology systems can disrupt your operations, keeping you from shipping orders, answering calls, taking orders, and processing credit cards.

The true cost of downtime can be significant, and includes many things other than just lost revenue from lost orders. Increased (and expensive) customer service time, refunded and cancelled orders, loss of customer loyalty, and opportunity loss associated with handling the outage itself can be tremendously expensive.

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.

Accessing the Internet from your business can often be the most critical potential failure points. Today’s e-commerce business use the Internet to send or receive emails, receive orders from your storefront, and produce shipping labels. Typically, small e-commerce businesses rely on DSL or cable Internet services. There are inexpensive, high-performance wireless based back-up systems available for your business to use in the event of an outage of your primary Internet provider.

After you implement a back-up wireless ISP system, you’ll need to set-up your network to automatically switch over in the event of a failure of your DSL or cable modem. The latest generation of inexpensive intelligent routers can be configured to automatically ping your ISP providers, and switch you between them so that if one goes down, you are switched over to the alternative system seamlessly.

If your phones lines are down, both customers and vendors have challenges working with you. The solution to this comes from a variety of new toll-free telephone services that can route your inbound calls to multiple phone numbers simultaneously. You can program them to call just your landline, or both landline and mobile phone. If you use VOIP, you can have it route calls to your VOIP number, but in an outage, have it also ring a landline or cellular phone.

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.

For longer-term power outages, make sure you have a back-up generator available to power your systems. Inexpensive generators are available at your home center, and an electrician can wire in a basic generator connection switches that can switch over your circuits to the generator with the flip of a switch. Test this system periodically to make sure the generator starts easily, and all the devices are plugged into the proper circuits.

Most of us focus our energy on having a high availability host for our website and stores. The goal isn’t just to make sure the site itself has high availability, but also all components that plug into the site. Make sure your payment processor’s systems are equally high uptime for both the payment gateway, and the authorizing network.

To protect yourself from a disaster like a fire, flood, or theft, make sure you are backing up on-line store’s data files at least weekly, and store the back-up off site. Make sure you get copies of data that might be on various PCs at your business.

The worst time to find out that one of your back-up systems isn’t working is when your primary system fails. To keep your online store running well, test your back-up systems periodically, and perform required maintenance when things are running well. Trying to fix your back up systems when your primary system is down is a double whammy to your business.

The benefits to your customers, your employees, and your own personal stress levels are significant. A business doing only $500,000 per year in business loses over $100 per business hour when operations are disrupted. The distraction can cost you even more by taking your time away from growing the business, to putting it onto fixing it. Every 1% of down time can cost you over $3,000, plus disrupt your life. Inexpensive investments in redundant and back-up systems can pay for themselves quickly, and easily.

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Tags: Business, credit cards, Internet, link, Links, website

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2008 at 2:22 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.