Stay Shoppable: Protect your Online Retail Uptime

Online retail can be unpredictable, which is why strategizing and optimizing your setup to ensure uptime, and in the worst-case scenario, shoppability during downtime, is the best way to protect your business and serve your customers. We’ve written a lot about the negative effects of downtime, and have shared a lot of resources to help you get your e-commerce setup ready for anything, but one key we’d recommend that you absolutely not go without is an origin shield. 

What can an origin shield offer for online retail companies? 

• Stay shoppable in outage conditions
• Continue to serve web and video content in outage and slowdown conditions to give the impression of uptime
• Protect yourself against traffic overloads
• Reduce risk of DDoS attacks 
• Speed up content delivery
• Make the most of your resources 

Knowing how important uptime is for user experience, sales and revenue, online retailers should focus on availability and staying shoppable. Origin shielding is a good first line of defense and a great way to get away with downtime without anyone knowing.

Origin shield: Always a good idea

Adding an origin shield to your setup is a low-effort way to protect your customers’ shopping experience, no matter what’s going on behind the scenes with your infrastructure. You won’t be able to guard against everything, and every retailer actually wants the volume that leads to a ‘thundering herd’ -- just not the negative potential after-effects. A lot of shoppers isn’t a bad problem to have -- you just have to be prepared for it.

While you can’t prevent all incidents and downtime, you can prepare your infrastructure for traffic overloads and even make yourself shoppable in outage conditions.