Magento - maintenance and support. How to secure an online store?
The value of the E-Commerce market in Poland has long exceeded 100 billion PLN. Your store is already part of this amount, and if you take care of its development and maintenance, its value will continue to grow. Today's consumer expects a nice, easy-to-use and fast-acting interface. At the same time, he has a low tolerance for failures and errors: if the store doesn't work, or doesn't work the way the consumer expects it to - he will abandon his shopping cart in the middle of shopping, and unsubscribe from the newsletter. Fortunately, you can avoid this.
From this article you will learn how to develop your e-commerce safely, take care of Magento maintenance and development and guarantee the stability of the platform. Enjoy your reading!
Online store failures-what can happen and what can be the consequences?
Any platform, regardless of the engine that you choose to develop it, is heavily exploited every day. As on the highway, many dangers await your car, so your store is exposed to a number of unexpected situations. Failures in the online store:
- related to hosting (unexpected increase in traffic + not enough resources in the cloud = inaccessible or unacceptably slow-loading website),
- related to integrations (payment gateway stops working suddenly, there are problems with transferring orders to external systems),
- resulting from the error of those responsible for adding new products, configuring promotions (wrong price, coupon not working),
- resulting from interference of third parties (attacks, attempts to steal consumers' personal data),
- introduced by projects and improvements - not every scenario can be predicted and tested. Some errors are simply too rare to detect in time.
In order to get to your destination safely, a good car owner should take care of regular maintenance and constantly monitor the condition of the vehicle. It's the same with your e-store, to keep it running well you need to constantly service it.
How to prevent crashes in Magento/Adobe Commerce?
The ideal solution - from the point of view of any store owner - would be to monitor and react immediately to any signs of errors in the store. Spotting the symptoms heralding a failure and preventing it is possible in many cases. A robot, pretending to be a human, can check: whether the login works, whether promotional products are visible on the site. Whether they can be added to the shopping cart, and then proceed to the payment step.
Current technologies allow for ongoing monitoring of many parameters, including the speed of operation and raising an alarm when irregularities are detected. Their working hours are not limited - late evening or weekend is no problem. These reliefs the workload of your store employees, who, instead of routinely checking the same scenarios, can focus on more creative and sales-generating tasks.
Also of crucial importance is the fast response time to requests coming from consumers (via the service desk). From store employees and monitoring alerts is the second pillar of a solid maintenance service. A non-functioning store should be repaired as soon as possible, without having to wait for the availability of maintenance. The support service is a guarantee of such quick assistance.
Does the development team (developers) alone guarantee a quick fix to the failure?
It is a well-known practice to give repairs to people who are simultaneously responsible for the development of the store. Why, in our opinion, is this not a good solution? Regardless of the software delivery methodology (waterfall, agile, hybrid), developers have their work carefully planned and when they are called in to look at a failure, they interrupt their development tasks, which delays their implementation. It may happen that a developer is not available at a given time (other working hours, holiday, sick leave) and will only take up the call a few days later. And this is unacceptable for more serious failures.
It is worth reducing such risks and transferring the responsibility to a dedicated support team. It has a different mode of work: it is prepared to immediately take up requests on agreed days and times, and often, thanks to continuous monitoring, the detection and repair of the fault is done before the customer even discovers that something is not working. The support team reports the repair and, if necessary, proceeds to determine the cause and eliminate it from the system.
Online store maintenance service - your policy for efficient e-commerce.
Support is not just fixing failures and errors found. It's also consultations, help with daily operations, training and often simple development work. An expert will be available when someone makes a mistake in setting up a promotion and needs to fix it urgently (because the whole world already knows about the promotion). If you expect increased traffic, the support team will secure additional resources and prepare to respond even faster.
Modern support is all about continuous monitoring and prevention of problems, thus constantly reducing the risk of incurring sales-related losses to an absolute minimum. Experience shows that the losses associated with a single store failure can exceed several months of maintenance costs. It is worth insuring against such losses and including in the budget the (fixed) cost of monitoring and support services. More difficult to calculate is the aspect of loss of customer confidence in the store, and consequently loss of sales. It's also worth remembering the store's employees: their comfort and productivity will increase when they can rely on someone to help them solve their problems and find answers to questions that Google can't always handle. The ongoing maintenance of an e-commerce platform requires the constant care of a programmer.
Support for Magento - how to choose?
At Monogo, we have been designing, building, developing and supporting online stores based on Magento/Adobe Commerce and, more recently, Shopware technology for over 12 years. A close-knit team of experienced analysts, developers and testers, supported by a group of managers in its portfolio, has a wide range of completed projects. We are specialists in Magento/Adobe Commerce implementations. Leave your contact in the form below, I'll show you 3 variants of support for your store.