If you receive a notification that Shopify is experiencing an outage, the first step is to read the description of the service disruption to assess if it could disrupt your business. If, for example, Shopify is experiencing issues with checkouts on Point of Sale, but you only sell online, you won’t need to worry. However, in the event that there is a widespread outage that affects your store and checkouts, here are some things you could do:
Inform your customer-facing teams
Informing your customer support team that there is an outage can help them get ahead of customer communication before an influx of messages. With Rewind Monitor, you can set up notifications to send directly to your customer support team’s email address, or set up the Slack integration to keep them up-to-date.
Pause your ad spend
If you are sending ad traffic to your store while Shopify is down, you may want to pause any affected campaigns until customers are able to visit your store and complete a checkout. This way, you’re not wasting your ad budget and frustrating potential customers.
Pause email and SMS campaigns
Similar to pausing your ad spend, by pausing your email and SMS campaigns, you will ensure that you don’t miss out on potential sales from those campaigns – and create a poor customer experience. For example, you wouldn’t want your customer receiving an abandoned cart email while they are unable to complete a checkout.
Communicate to your customers and community
Depending on the severity of the outage, you may want to proactively communicate (for example, via social media) to let potential customers know that you are aware of the issue, as well as inform them once it’s been resolved.