Just like the airline pilot who uses advanced early detection systems to monitor his airplane’s vitals, it’s also crucial for the ecommerce manager to have a system in place to ensure everything is up and running right. At the first hint of trouble, the pilot then knows what to do in order to make corrective adjustments to avoid further problems that may ultimately send the plane into a nosedive. The same is true for ecommerce managers; with an advanced warning system in place there is still time for system recovery.

Of course, the difference between an early failure detection system for ecommerce stores and airplanes is huge. Most of the time the ecommerce store goes completely offline and crashes before the alarm goes off, whereas the pilot is thankfully still in the air when the sirens begin to blare.

But unlike the plane, the ecommerce store can be restored to flight readiness within minutes of a crash landing. The key is finding out when it crashes. There are no passengers howling or air traffic controllers beckoning. Yes, there are likely frustrated customers cursing your site when it goes down, but an ecommerce manager shouldn’t count on them for help-we all know unsatisfied ecommerce customers just go elsewhere to shop when at first they don’t succeed.

Because ecommerce stores are open 24 hours, a system failure that occurs during non-business day hours may not be noticed until the start of the next business day or even worse after a weekend long crash. It’s important to have more than one manager on call to watch for unexpected outages as a weekend without a website could mean a substantial loss of many thousands of dollars and consumer trust in the brand.

It’s also essential that managers take the task of monitoring into their own hands, instead of depending on third parties providers to promptly alert clients to these devastating outages.

Thankfully, there are effective ecommerce performance monitoring tools out there: Take Pingdom for example, which generates “uptime reports, response time reports, email, text & twitter alerts, multiple check locations, error analysis, public and email reports,” etc.

Along with having good early detection and alert tools in place, it’s also paramount to have an emergency response team in place who can act quickly to bring the store back online.

What tools and response plans do you have in place if (and when) your store goes down? We welcome your comments!