It looks like tough times are coming for e-commerce players. Given the possibility of a major recession, many are preparing hard, anticipating lower profits and higher expenses.
Therefore, it is important during this time for businesses to get the basics right. Here he has two dangerous temptations. The first is to invest in flashy new systems to stand out from the competition. Second, use budget providers for critical systems such as payments to reduce costs wherever possible.Neither plan
that’s right That’s wrong. New technology can revolutionize your business, but so too can you find better deals for the same level of service. However, it is far more likely that the best course of action is to go back to basics and ensure that payment systems are efficient, robust and secure.
Uptime, Downtime and Payments
The average payment company has an uptime rate of 99.9%. While this sounds impressive, it actually means that your site will not receive payments for 43 minutes each month. For very small sites, or sites that rely on a few very high payments, this might not be a problem, but for sites that rely on doing business on an ongoing basis , 43 minutes can lead to thousands and even tens of thousands of sales and lost customers.
Planned maintenance is an inevitable part of using any digital system. Even major websites like Amazon and Facebook may not have access to their services for at least part of their huge customer base. However, these websites are geographically dispersed, making them inaccessible to their entire user base. It doesn’t go offline immediately. Even a semi-capable payment company should keep its customers well informed of any planned maintenance.
A majority of businesses (82%) have experienced unplanned downtime in the last three years, with many experiencing more than one downtime. There are multiple causes for this, the most common being human error. One typo or misconfiguration of a component by him in the command prompt could take the entire network offline for hours until the problem is fixed. Mandatory updates by card schemes occur at least twice a year, and bugs and configuration conflicts can cause downtime. There are also deliberate attacks, such as distributed denial of service attacks, that can take individual merchants and payment systems used by merchants offline, or at least slow them down to the point of being unusable. This is especially problematic when the individual components used by the seller also consist of multiple connected cloud components. A DDOS attack on a single service that performs a single critical function of a payment processor could take a merchant’s site offline. The average uptime of 99.9% is amazing considering the variety of issues that can arise.
How to maintain 99.99% uptime
Let’s say you could reduce downtime from 43 minutes to just 4 minutes per month, or 99.99% uptime, without sacrificing other services. This is something only premium brands in the payments industry can offer, and others may be cutting corners to keep costs low. This number doesn’t include planned maintenance or unplanned events like card schemes going offline, but it’s still significantly better than most of the market.
The first way to maintain 99.99% uptime is to create a bespoke payment system for every merchant. This means that each seller sells a unique product and, aside from many other benefits, she cannot put all her customers’ eggs in one basket. Whenever possible, we can do small a la carte updates as needed, preferably with hotfixes that don’t cause downtime.
From there, there are many ways to achieve higher uptime. Below are just a few.
- No third-party dependencies allow for standardization of the system and less reliance on uncontrolled variables. This allows change requests and updates to be standardized across systems, ensuring that all changes made are applied across the portfolio, avoiding complex testing and excessive updates.
- Legacy processors are not test agile due to capacity and customization issues (customization is problematic because it creates a non-standardized environment, which requires test exceptions and increases implementation time) .
- The payment receipt processing facility has redundant servers that can be moved between servers in real time.
- Having an API for everything means that human error is greatly reduced. For example, MID generation is automated via an API, taking only 5-10 minutes and avoiding human error.
- Alternative payment methods are provided so that users can continue to transact if their Visa or Mastercard is suspended.
- We continuously invest in product development, maintenance and optimization to support the never-ending market demands.
The importance of choosing the right payment partner
Given how much downtime could cost them, merchants began looking at ways to increase uptime so customers wouldn’t see the dreaded “check later” screen. It is important to Unless you probably have a deep, long-standing relationship with your customers, or you’re selling a product or service that’s unique enough that you can’t go anywhere else, your customers won’t wait as soon as they know your payment system is down. prize. A quick Google search will take you to another site, so why should you?
Think of your e-commerce site as a luxury brand, even if the branding isn’t at all. At first glance, the luxury brands aren’t that different from their mass-market counterparts, but you’re paying for craftsmanship, which means your £100 boots will last far longer than their £50 counterparts. Payment systems are the same, with the big difference that a well-crafted system is significantly less expensive than a lazy system. You can find payment partners willing to create bespoke products that offer high uptime and other popular qualities without breaking the bank. This is very important at a time when sellers are struggling.
