A routine update that broke checkout for 24 hours
Andy Lam, the Digital Marketing Specialist at Crossrope, was doing some routine updates to the theme code. It’s a task every store owner is used to doing, but this particular update broke the ability for customers to add products to their cart, essentially halting all sales.
When the Crossrope team contacted BigCommerce for help – they discovered something the majority of retailers are not aware of. Platforms like BigCommerce or Shopify cannot restore individual accounts.
Andy had to turn to the last manual (theme) backup Crossrope had. Retailers sometimes have a backup on hand, but there is one major downside: they are often outdated. In Crossrope’s case, their backup was a month old. Restoring the month-old backup caused its own set of problems as any theme updates over the last month were lost. The entire process of restoring the site back to normal took 24 hours of work and resulted in lost sales opportunities.
From a risk management standpoint, if anything happens to your store Rewind can restore it back to a point in time. With Rewind, I know Crossrope won’t lose sales anymore because of inadvertent theme changes.
Andy Lam
Digital Marketing Specialist, Crossrope
Not wanting to go through the same stress again, the Crossrope team installed Rewind to have an up-to-date backup at all times that can be restored quickly and painlessly either by themselves or with the help of the Rewind team. We talked to Andy Lam, the Digital Marketing Specialist at Crossrope, to get the full story.
Interview with Crossrope
Andy: I added a snippet of code to the live site to fix a styling issue, but had multiple tabs open inside the theme editor. I pressed save and expected everything to work fine because I had tested it earlier. This was at the end of the business day, and the next morning I learned that our customers weren’t able to place orders. The CEO checked with BigCommerce at midnight and they didn’t have a backup of our store. The best option was to load a month old version of the theme to allow customers to purchase again. The month-old backup caused current campaign pages we were running to become inactive because the page codes were no longer available.
Rewind Team: Were you surprised that BigCommerce didn’t have a recent backup of your store?
Andy: It was something always in the back of our minds and we knew the risk. After the incident, we began doing data exports every three days and were really careful when making updates to the site. We were only exporting part of our store, for example, we couldn’t back up our SKUs or options. Because of our team’s workload, we didn’t have enough capacity to backup more often – it wasn’t the greatest solution. Now with Rewind, we are able to backup more than we were able to before.
Rewind Team: Can you quantify the time and cost of the downtime you experienced?
Andy: It took about 24 hours to get the site up and running properly, restoring theme changes to the same point before the incident. It’s hard to estimate the overall impact, especially since we’ll lose first-time customers forever because it was a poor experience – you can’t quantify that.
Rewind Team: How did you hear about Rewind and get started?
Andy: My CEO had received a notice from BigCommerce about Rewind. I took a look at it and the rest is history. It was really easy to implement. I had Spencer (Account Manager at Rewind) guide me through the product and answered all my questions. Rewind Backups aligned with everything we were looking for.
Rewind Team: Would you recommend Rewind to other merchants?
Andy: Yes, I would definitely recommend Rewind to other BigCommerce merchants. From a risk management standpoint, if anything happens to your store Rewind can restore it back to a point in time. With Rewind, I know Crossrope won’t lose sales anymore because of inadvertent theme changes.
About Crossrope
Crossrope is a fitness brand that helps busy people get fit with their unique jump rope workout experience. With their interchangeable weighted jump rope system and a fitness app that offers hundreds of fun and effective workouts, Crossrope gives people the freedom to achieve their fitness goals anywhere, on their terms.
Key takeaways
- Human error is inevitable. Common tasks such as editing your store theme can break your site – Crossrope learned this the hard way when it took 24 hours to fix a mistake, losing potential sales during that time.
- Exporting data from your BigCommerce store as a backup isn’t enough to protect your critical data – only parts of your store can be exported and it adds to your team’s heavy workload.
- With Rewind, the burden of backing up store data is removed from the Crossrope team’s shoulders and they now have accurate and up-to-date backups of their BigCommerce store which can be restored quickly when needed.
Is your marketing team too busy to be running daily backups of your ecommerce store? We don’t blame them. Get Rewind and automate your backups – your team will thank you.
