Black Friday Cyber Monday downtime: The cost for one global athletic apparel retailer and how to avoid the same fate

Let a Black Friday nightmare for one global athletic apparel retailer be a lesson in why your technology team shouldn’t take any chances when it comes to data protection. 

A common misconception among eCommerce merchants is that the popular platforms they use to host their stores, like Shopify and BigCommerce, are automatically backing up their data. One major athletic apparel retailer was counted among this group and learned some hard lessons along the way—leading them to implement a backup solution for all 14 of their Shopify stores.

In order to get the full picture, we need to go back several years. On Black Friday of 2015, their website (then built on Magento) went down for 8 hours straight. Customers took to social media to express their disappointment, and the retailer was on damage control during what should have been their most profitable weekend of the year.

“The failure cost an estimated $143,000 in lost sales. Worse, it also cost the company the trust it had spent years earning from customers expecting a great experience.” Shopify reported.

Since then, worldwide spending on BFCM has exploded to a record-high $9.3 billion in sales, and so has the company’s popularity and customer base. These two factors ultimately mean that the damage and cost of downtime are much greater today.

How eCommerce platforms are backed up

SaaS apps, including eCommerce platforms, take extensive precautions to ensure their servers won’t fail and maintain service availability. They all have a security team dedicated to the platform’s availability and are responsible for disaster recovery in the event of a major problem. This is one of the many benefits of using a service like Shopify or BigCommerce over a self-hosted system, like Magento (now Adobe Commerce).

In the unlikely event that one of Shopify’s data centers experiences a system-wide update or failure resulting in lost data, their security team will recover the entire platform to the last backup. You might experience a few minutes of downtime, or even none at all, depending on how fast they can react to the situation.

But here’s the thing. They will not use that same backup to recover a single account back to a previous point in time.

What the platforms have is a macro-backup of their entire system. This covers you for incidents on their end, like a platform-wide data breach. What Rewind offers is a micro-backup of just your account that can be used in case of a disaster on your end.

The retailer shared that their disaster in 2015 was caused by an app integrated with their Magento store. Disasters like those caused by third-party apps or human error are just two of the six most common reasons for downtime and data loss in eCommerce stores.

SaaS apps (like Shopify and BigCommerce) use the Shared Responsibility Model, meaning users share the responsibility of data protection. While they do “save” your data, it’s jumbled up with all the data from all users, and not in a format that can be easily restored. They don’t take any responsibility for your individual user data, which means that your online store is left vulnerable to malicious attacks, breaches, and other threats.

When you install Rewind in your eCommerce store, you get two security teams working to keep your data protected from a multitude of possible disasters. That’s a pretty good deal, if you ask us.

The case for backups

In 2018, after a risk assessment of their online stores and learning that Shopify does not protect their individual site-level data, the retailer decided to prioritize third-party backups to protect their store.

Once Shopify confirmed that they weren’t taking complete, daily backups of every store, the retailer began the process of choosing Rewind. They were also under the impression that since each of their stores is a replica of the others, it would be simple to sync one store to another in case they lost any data. However, after further research into that process, they realized that the sync would take 12 hours. That’s a lot of downtime, which means a lot of sales lost. As a result, Rewind was leveraged for automated data backups and rapid, on-demand recovery.

Thousands of Shopify and BigCommerce merchants trust Rewind to automatically back up their stores every day. The ability to proactively safeguard their store and restore it back to the way it was, moments before disaster strikes, is what makes those merchants much more resilient in the face of downtime.

If your online store is the heartbeat of your business, Rewind will provide you with the peace of mind that your store is safe and secure on a daily basis. Get started with a free trial today.

For more information about Rewind, please visit rewind.com. Or, learn more about how to back up Shopifyback up BigCommerce, or back up QuickBooks Online.