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Hi,

In this edition of Real Talk, I'll be talking about the damaging effects of website dowtime and what we've done to markedly reduce website downtime to give your business the best chance possible to thrive online.

Website downtime and your business

Website downtime means lost sales

You've invested the time, money, and hard work to build an amazing website to propel your business forward to new heights. The designers have made the site look engaging, professional, and a real reflection of your brand. The programmers have put in place some truly advanced back-end functionality to streamline your business workflows.

You've built up great search rankings, and got to the first page of Google. A new customer with bucket loads of cash clicks on your site's Google search listing link, but your site fails to load. It's down. It's hard work to win an online sale, yet so easy to lose one. For eCommerce sites, downtime can mean significant loss of sales. For example Amazon experienced an outage in 2013 that cost them an estimated $1.86m (USD) per hour. Ouch! http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/08/19/amazon-com-goes-down-loses-66240-per-minute/

Website downtime means lost customers

One lost sale is not the end of the world, but some of your customers are loyal regulars, they come back again for the service and relationships you've built with them. That loyalty will begin to erode if your website downtime is long enough or regular enough. Some customers will never return. It's cheaper to keep existing customers than to acquire new ones.

Website downtime damages your reputation

What is your business reputation worth? That can be difficult to accurately assess and answer. The long term impact from damaged reputation on revenue and profitability needs to be considered.

There are some cost tangible elements such as marketing & PR efforts, customer service calls, and emails to manage and spruce up your businesses profile again.

The intagible costs can be translated into what is the long term cost of losing one client? It's hard to put an exact number on it, but the costs are real.

Website downtime can impact your search rankings

Search engines want to display quality links to their users, so the ranking algorithm factors in website availability. For small periods of downtime, rankings won't be affected. However if your site is down when the next search engine robot / crawler visits, it's going to negatively affect your ranking.

What is TOTECS doing for your website's uptime?

This article feels very doom and gloom so far, but here is the good news. As you probably know during May 2015, we migrated your website to our new 'High Availability eCommerce Platform'. After 2 years in development the investment is paying off and will do for years to come. So how are we tracking:

The projected total direct increase in yearly online sales across our client base due to higher uptime with the new HA system is $756,399 (based off of 75% of online trading done in a 10 hour daily window). You can then add on the reduced costs of lower repuatation / loyalty losses for the year which at the most basic level would be Lost Customers * Average Yearly Revenue Per Customer.

Takeways

• Website uptime has a signifcant effect on online business performance.
• TOTECS is now deleivering a system that provides your website with uptime that is significantly higher than the industry average. 99.998% vs 99.5%.
• TOTECS is constantly improving and evolving both its quality and quantity of features and technology.

Tip of the Week

For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return is $44.25 (source). Not on TOTECS eMarketing yet? Give us a call on 1300 123 500, or send an email to service@totecs.com and we'll help you get started.