With the ecommerce explosion of the past year, we’ve seen more retailers turn to online sales to stay in business. New stores are popping up every day, and for many of them, Shopify is the ecommerce platform of choice.
Ecommerce is Booming
Shopify recently reported revenue growth of 110% since last year and a 71% rise in subscription solutions, all due to new merchants joining the platform.
With all that sudden growth and so many new subscribers, it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that service issues would multiply. But knowing that you’re not alone is little comfort when your Shopify store is down.
Downtime is costly. Every minute your store isn’t live and functioning as it should is an opportunity lost. You don’t often get a second chance with customers today. If your store isn’t available, they’ll quickly click away and buy from your competitor. By most industry estimates, you’ve got about 15 seconds before they bounce. The faster you can figure out why your Shopify store isn’t working, the less severe the fallout will be.
Common Reasons Why Your Shopify Store is Down
Here are some of the top reasons why your store might be down, why it happens, and what you can do about it.
- Shopify Website is Down. If your store is down or unavailable, you should first make sure that it’s not something to do with the site itself. Shopify could be down temporarily for maintenance or more serious issues. If it’s the former, they’ll usually send an email letting you know in advance. If it’s the latter, check with a service like IsItDownRightNow or DownDetector to see what their status is.
- Your Domain is Unverified. If you’ve just set up a new store and it’s not working as it should, it could be that the email you’re using for your store does not match the one associated with your domain. You’ll need to verify that you own the domain before Shopify releases it from review, so be sure the information you use to set up the store is correct and that you have access to your website c-panel to make the necessary changes.
- Accidental Deletion. If you’ve recently updated your store, added new products, collections, pages, or anything at all, it’s possible that you might have deleted a file or code that your page depends on to function. In this case, you’d need to restore from a backup and start the process anew. Rewind Backups for Shopify is a fully hosted backup service that runs in the background, so you always have a clean copy of your store to back up from.
- Failed CSV Uploads. It’s not unusual for errors to happen when you do bulk uploads from a CSV file. For example, if the file is corrupted, if there are any discrepancies in the naming of columns, or there is a tiny error in the code, it tends to shut everything down. That’s why it’s a good idea to run a backup before uploading any CSV files.
- Incompatible Apps or Themes. Third-party apps on the Shopify app store are great, but they don’t always play well with certain themes and/or other apps. If you are using an older theme, it could cause some incompatibility issues, causing your site to malfunction or fail. Restoring from a backup is the first order of business. Then you can proceed to do the necessary updates so that you can take full advantage of Shopify’s apps and other advanced features.
These are just a few of the reasons your Shopify store might be down; some are beyond your control, and some are innocent mistakes that are totally fixable—assuming you have a backup. Rewind Backups for Shopify and Shopify Plus is an easy, affordable way to back up your store. If your store goes down, you’ll be back up in minutes, minimizing downtime and—just maybe—helping you sleep a little better at night.
