Don’t Risk Holiday Season Sales: How to Protect Your E-Commerce Store From Data Disasters
By Mike Potter, Rewind
The holiday shopping season and Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BF/CM) have a significant impact on annual retail sales and can determine whether retailers turn a profit for the year. With such high stakes, it is absolutely critical for retailers to avoid any downtime on their sites. For every second spent trying to get a broken web site back up and running, competitors are scooping up sales.
The Risks Of Relying On Cloud Backups In E-Commerce
Established e-Commerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce work hard to prevent systemwide data disasters. However, as most cloud platforms follow the Shared Responsibility Model for data protection, there are limitations surrounding the data they protect and backup. While they protect the software and infrastructure powering the software, individual retail businesses are responsible for backing up and securing their own account-level data.
Retailers need account-level backups to protect data sets and content such as product listings, orders, customer lists, blog posts, gift cards, themes and more. If account-level data or content is accidentally deleted, platforms cannot “flip a switch” to restore anything; it may be gone forever.
The Causes Of Data Disasters
Data disasters at the account level can be triggered by a number of things. A few common scenarios include:
DIY editing or modifying of theme code: It may seem like a good idea to try to save time and money for retailers to take a stab at their own coding skills to make “simple” site updates. Yet merchants often end up spending more time trying to reverse changes that didn’t work or breaking something altogether. Having to redo tasks or hire someone to help clean up the mess negates any potential cost savings.
Third-Party Apps Gone Bad: The average e-Commerce store has eight to 10 different integrations. These tools make life easier when they are working, but every so often these apps can wreak havoc, even the ones sitting idly in the background. Even though platforms vet apps beforehand, they will not guarantee perfect integration with a retailer’s store. And after an app is installed, permission to view, edit or modify data is often granted. Unfortunately, an entire product line can be completely lost or inventory counts changed by an app gone wrong — taking hours, even days, to recover without proper backups in place.
Disgruntled Employees: Employees often have substantial access to store operations. Therefore, they can delete important files either accidentally or on purpose. It may seem far-fetched that an employee would take such drastic actions, but it happens.
Freelancers Making Mistakes: Whether hiring a seasoned professional or reaching out to a newbie on Fiverr, statistics show that some type of error is inevitable. For instance, something as seemingly innocuous as contracting a web developer to make backend code edits could destroy an entire site.
Multiple Stores: As retail brands build out different product lines or expand internationally, multiple stores are becoming the norm. Given the challenges of recovering one site from a data disaster, imagine juggling two or three! Efficient use of time and resources is essential during the madness of BFCM, especially if a retailer is spending a lot of time updating themes and products across multiple stores.
Accidental Deletions: Data loss by accidental deletion can happen in all sorts of ways. Something as seemingly harmless as trying to delete a blog category could end up deleting ALL blog posts in that category. We once even had a cat jump on a customer’s keyboard and mess up their entire online store.
So How Do I Prevent It?
The picture we’ve painted may seem bleak, but there are ways to mitigate and avoid data disasters. Here are our top four:
Strict Access and Permission Settings: As a retailer’s operation grows, so does the number of employees and contractors touching the site. Create strong, unique passwords for every user and NEVER let people share login info or passwords. For each user, provide the minimum permissions needed to do their job. For example, if creating an account for someone to manage orders, only give them permission to see and edit orders. Giving people unnecessary access to a store increases risk — whether it be malicious or just a mistake.
Evaluate and Understand the Impact of Third-Party Apps: A routine and thorough audit of the integrations touching an e-Commerce site is a good idea (especially before the holiday rush). Determine whether the risk of having an app installed is worth the benefit. With every third-party integration, risk of data being manipulated or edited increases.
Set a “Code-Freeze” Date: Basically no one, and we mean NO ONE, is allowed to install any new apps or make any changes to the store during a predetermined set of dates. For an event like BFCM, we often recommend starting a code-freeze 10 days before the main event. The only exception is if something is broken and needs to be fixed. This sounds simple, but it is a highly effective strategy to reduce the chances of something breaking the site.
Back Up Store Data: The most common way is to export each data set into a CSV file. This manual download is explained in detail by various e-Commerce platforms but has its limitations. It is time consuming and laborious to update and cross-reference multiple spreadsheets. Every time a change is made to a store, a new CSV file must be exported. There are now robust tools that automate the backup process and can bring back a store in just a few clicks.
As e-Commerce sales continue to capture market share during the holiday season, online retailers need to be on their A-game. Data protection is now just as important as your product quality, marketing or shipping strategies. As you create a BFCM to-do list, make sure that backing up your account-level data is a top priority. It just might be the difference between a Happy Holiday or a Bah Humbug.
Mike Potter is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rewind, a leading cloud data backup provider. Rewind is trusted by over 20,000 businesses to protect their data on platforms such as BigCommerce, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Shopify and QuickBooks. A veteran entrepreneur, Potter has over 25 years of experience building solutions for the software, cloud and data analytics space, including tenures at Adobe and Mozilla. He earned his MBA from the University of Ottawa and his B.Eng in Mechanical Engineering from McMaster University, and currently resides in Ottawa, Canada.