Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, an increasing number of people are currently using online resources for their daily lives to work from home, shop online, and for entertainment.
Many companies are now turning to ecommerce to fulfill their customers’ orders and those who already have ecommerce stores may be seeing an increase in traffic, causing reliability or performance issues. As a business becomes more digital, the reliability, performance and security of their website becomes more important than ever.
RapidSpike has created an offer which helps those businesses struggling with demand to have a platform to ensure they can be reactive to issues, proactively fix problems and protect themselves from attacks.
In this blog we aim to highlight the challenges ecommerce owners face in this rapidly-changing environment, and how companies can be proactive by taking measures to stay in control in this uneasy time.
Performance
The uptime of your website is the beating heart of your online business. Without your site being up and performing, customers cannot access your products, services or information. For these reasons it is important to ensure your site is online and available to customers.
Current ecommerce sites, in particular supermarkets, are seeing an increase in users trying to access their site. During special occasions such as seasonal sales, ecommerce sites can prepare for an increase in traffic. However, due to the unpredicted influx in people panic buying because of COVID-19, many sites cannot process the number of visitors due to underlying problems hampering their ability to scale.
On Wednesday 18th March, supermarket giant Ocado ran into this issue when their website had a queue of 5,000+ visitors. Eventually, Ocado decided to take down the whole site until Saturday 21st to make essential changes. Similarly, learning platform Firefly faces continued problems with their uptime due to an influx in children being educated at home via the platform. The problem with performance issues is not only the loss of sales and revenue, but the loss of customer trust and reputation. In a pandemic people could lose essential services that they rely on which can cause distress for users.
RapidSpike helps to both monitor and improve performance by acting exactly like a customer would, making purchases, browsing and registering accounts. This enables us to gather details that will give you key information to keep you online and fast. We explain the more technical changes site owners can make in our blog post – Preparing your Site for Black Friday.
Client Side Security
Client side security is incredibly important to ensure your customers are protected throughout their online experience.
Despite a message from leading criminal gangs suggesting they won’t attack hospitals during the COVID-19 crisis, our sources have shown that there has been a 20% increase in web-skimming attacks since the virus outbreak, meaning that they are switching their interest to ecommerce.
This is an ever-changing environment and this disruption to regular life means websites are constantly under pressure. Key staff are either ill or working from home and therefore there is an increased risk of vulnerabilities.
In heightened events, there has also proven to be an increase in ecommerce attacks. This can be seen in Holiday Shopping attacks, and Australian Wildfire donation attacks. Hackers know more people are online right now meaning there’s a possibility of increased revenue for them to earn. To read more about web-skimming attacks visit our library of Magecart Monthly blogs.
RapidSpike Attack Detection not only detects these attacks but provides tools to identify vulnerabilities so that you can be confident you are protecting your clients.
RapidSpike’s COVID-19 Offer
At RapidSpike we understand this is a challenging time for companies trying to adjust to new changes on their online platforms. To assist companies in improving their digital platforms, RapidSpike are offering a free performance & security plan until the 31st of August 2020 to all Yorkshire-headquartered businesses with websites that sell products.
RapidSpike monitoring will check your website for downtime, performance issues and data theft attacks. Remember – cyber criminals can continue to do their stuff from self isolation.
It is fundamentally important that all businesses are able to operate effectively to help people in this time of crisis. We’d like to help as much as we can – especially to our fellow Yorkshire-based businesses.
Whether it’s keeping customers safe, managing record-breaking traffic, or monitoring your shopping cart processes – RapidSpike can make the difference in ensuring your business’ survival.
To access this offer, please request a trial account and email info@rapidspike.com with your request of the offer and we will convert your trial account to a full-access account.
NOTE: To ensure we can provide as many ecommerce businesses as possible with free monitoring, all sign-ups will be assessed prior to being converted to a full-access account. This offer also excludes current RapidSpike customers.
We hope this blog is useful for those who are currently transitioning to ecommerce. If you have any questions feel free to contact us and our friendly team will be more than happy to assist with any questions.
Additionally, we have created a COVID-19 Resource Library which highlights some useful blog posts we have written to assist ecommerce stores with issues they may face.
