Monitoring Your E-commerce Business to Keep Thriving

You have worked hard to build your e-commerce business.  You spend late nights and long days and finally with a bit of luck your business took off.  Now you are established, but there are many new startups always trying to take a bite of the success.  Your business is sound and you have built a good system. 

You need to monitor various subsystems or key aspects of your business. This will help you operate the business in an efficient way, identify business issues, and correct existing processes to increase business competitiveness.  

Monitoring Key Aspects of Your Business

You need to monitor your cash flow and ensure the customers are paying on time.  You may want to evaluate the payment processing options and check out if a new provider is offering the payment processing at lower fees without affecting security and other key aspects of payment processing. This will improve profitability.

In addition to monitoring cash flows, you may also need to regularly monitor Google Analytics to see if the user experience is in the right direction.  The various reports and graphs in the Google Analytics will throw light on whats working well, what is not and what is something that may become an issue in the future.

You need to monitor your inventory and ensure you are stocking the heavily purchased items in enough numbers.  If your products are digital, you want to check and ensure the license keys are not being misused by some hack and losing revenue.

You want to check your internal processes and regularly audit to ensure that the vigorousness in maintaining standards has not been lost. Audits are wonderful instrument to bring back seriousness in following process within the organization.

If there are yearly planning exercises done to get the e-commerce business ready for peak season, then they need to be done with the same thoroughness as they were done when the company built the business and established itself as a leader in the business. If this is related to a website then it needs to plan to peak volume, security issues, geographic load balancing, backups etc. 

Lets not Forget about Website Monitoring

Nothing is as important as a good website monitoring service as it helps to not only detect a downtime, but helps to diagnose the reasons for the downtime. There is a possibility of earning business revenues only if the e-commerce site is accessible to the users.  Unfortunately, when things go wrong the site can come to zero accessibility or get impaired with performance issues in a matter of seconds. These few downtime minutes can bring in huge reduction in online sales, loss in business revenues and may damage company's reputation. Regularly monitoring website using a good site monitoring tool  will help to proactively identify an issue and prevent a potential downtime even before it happens.

Implement Recovery Planning

Routine backups of data are very important and keeping an offsite location for the data is also good way to ensure you can recover from an issue. Formulate a strategy for recovery planning to minimize downtime and avoid the risks of financial losses. Planning for redundancies and business continuity across various dimensions of the business will help in preventing unneeded carelessness.