It's Black Friday. Your biggest sale of the year.
Traffic is 15x normal. Orders are flying in. Then your checkout page starts timing out. By the time you notice — 23 minutes later, after a frustrated customer tweets at you — you've lost $47,000 in revenue.
This isn't a hypothetical. It happens every year to stores of all sizes.
E-commerce downtime isn't just an inconvenience. It's a direct hit to your bottom line.
According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. For e-commerce sites during peak periods, that number can easily 10x. And unlike a blog or a marketing site, every second your store is down is a sale you'll never recover.
In this guide, we'll cover exactly what e-commerce sites need to monitor, how to set up alerts that actually matter, and how to prepare for the traffic spikes that make or break your year.
Why E-commerce Monitoring Is Different
Monitoring an online store isn't the same as monitoring a typical website.
Here's why e-commerce demands a more rigorous approach:
Every page has direct revenue impact
On a blog, a slow page loses a reader. On an e-commerce site, a slow product page loses a sale. A broken checkout loses dozens. The connection between uptime and revenue is immediate and measurable.
Traffic is unpredictable and spiky
E-commerce traffic doesn't follow a smooth curve. It spikes during:
- Flash sales and promotions
- Email campaigns going out
- Social media mentions
- Black Friday / Cyber Monday
- Holiday shopping seasons
A site that handles 1,000 daily visitors might suddenly face 20,000 in an hour. Your monitoring needs to catch issues at any scale.
Complex third-party dependencies
Your store doesn't run in isolation. It depends on:
- Payment processors (Stripe, PayPal, Square)
- Inventory management systems
- Shipping rate calculators
- CDNs and image hosting
- Review widgets and social proof tools
- Email service providers
Any of these can fail independently — and take your conversions down with them.
Customer trust is fragile
E-commerce customers are entering credit card numbers. They're trusting you with personal information. One broken experience — a failed payment, an error message, a timeout — and they may never return.
Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.
The 7 Critical Pages Every E-commerce Site Must Monitor
Not all pages are equally important. Focus your monitoring on the pages that directly impact revenue.
1. Homepage and landing pages
Your homepage is often the first impression. Landing pages from ads and campaigns are where you're actively paying for traffic. If either is down, you're burning money.
Monitor for: HTTP 200 status, response time under 2 seconds.
2. Product pages (especially bestsellers)
Your top 10 products probably drive 50%+ of your revenue. A broken product page for your bestseller is catastrophic.
Monitor for: Page loads successfully, images render, "Add to Cart" functionality works.
3. Search functionality
For stores with large catalogs, search is how customers find products. If search is slow or broken, users can't buy what they came for.
Monitor for: Search endpoint responds, returns results within acceptable time.
4. Shopping cart page
The cart is the transition point from browsing to buying. Customers who've added items have shown clear intent — don't lose them here.
Monitor for: Cart loads with items, price calculations work, "Proceed to Checkout" functions.
5. Checkout flow (every step)
Multi-step checkouts need monitoring at each stage:
- Shipping address entry
- Shipping method selection
- Payment information
- Order review
A failure at any step means an abandoned cart.
Monitor for: Each step loads, form submissions work, no JavaScript errors.
6. Payment processing
This is where the money moves. Payment failures are the most painful — the customer was ready to pay, and you couldn't take their money.
Monitor for: Payment gateway connectivity, successful test transactions if possible.
7. Order confirmation page
The "thank you" page confirms the purchase went through. If this fails, customers don't know if they were charged, leading to duplicate orders, support tickets, and chargebacks.
Monitor for: Page loads after successful payment, order details display correctly.
Third-Party Dependencies That Can Kill Sales
Your e-commerce site is only as reliable as its weakest dependency.
| Dependency | What Happens When It Fails |
|---|---|
| Payment gateway (Stripe, PayPal) | Checkout completely broken, zero sales |
| Inventory system | Overselling, wrong availability shown |
| Shipping calculator | Customers can't see shipping costs, abandon cart |
| CDN / Image hosting | Product images don't load, site looks broken |
| Review widgets | Social proof missing, lower conversion rates |
| Email provider | Order confirmations don't send, support chaos |
How to protect yourself:
- Monitor third-party status pages — Get alerts when Stripe or PayPal report issues
- Track response times from your end — Sometimes services degrade before they admit it
- Have fallback plans — Can you accept PayPal if Stripe is down?
- Set up synthetic monitoring — Test the actual user flow, not just the endpoint
When Stripe has an outage, you want to know before your customers do.
Setting E-commerce-Specific Alert Thresholds
Standard monitoring thresholds aren't aggressive enough for e-commerce.
Here's what we recommend:
| Page Type | Response Time Warning | Response Time Critical | Check Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homepage | > 1.5 seconds | > 3 seconds | Every 1 min |
| Product pages | > 2 seconds | > 4 seconds | Every 1 min |
| Cart page | > 1.5 seconds | > 3 seconds | Every 1 min |
| Checkout steps | > 2 seconds | > 3 seconds | Every 1 min |
| Payment processing | > 3 seconds | > 5 seconds | Every 1 min |
| Search | > 1 second | > 2 seconds | Every 1 min |
Prioritize alerts by revenue impact
Not every alert needs the same response:
- Checkout/payment issues: Immediate SMS + phone call
- Cart/product pages: SMS + email
- Homepage/landing pages: Email + Slack
- Blog/content pages: Email only
Don't wake yourself up at 3 AM for a slow blog page. Do wake up for a broken checkout.
Adjust thresholds for peak periods
During Black Friday or major sales:
- Tighten response time thresholds (users are less patient)
- Increase check frequency to every 30 seconds if possible
- Add more team members to alert recipients
- Have someone actively watching dashboards
Preparing for Peak Sales Periods
The worst time to discover a problem is during your biggest sale.
Pre-sale checklist (2-4 weeks before)
- Load test your site at 10-20x normal traffic
- Review and optimize slow database queries
- Ensure CDN is properly configured
- Verify SSL certificates won't expire during sale
- Test checkout flow end-to-end
- Confirm payment processor can handle volume
- Scale server resources proactively
- Brief your team on incident response
During the sale
- Have someone monitoring dashboards in real-time
- Set up a dedicated incident response channel (Slack, Discord)
- Keep DevOps/engineering on standby
- Monitor social media for customer complaints
- Check third-party service status pages hourly
- Log everything for post-mortem analysis
Incident response plan
Know in advance:
- Who gets alerted first?
- Who has authority to make changes?
- What's the rollback plan if a deployment fails?
- Who communicates with customers?
- Where do you update your status page?
Chaos during an incident costs time. Preparation saves it.
The Cost of NOT Monitoring (Real Numbers)
Let's make this concrete.
Revenue loss by store size
| Monthly Revenue | Revenue per Minute | 30-min Outage Cost |
|---|---|---|
| $50,000 | $1.16 | $35 |
| $100,000 | $2.31 | $69 |
| $500,000 | $11.57 | $347 |
| $1,000,000 | $23.15 | $694 |
| $5,000,000 | $115.74 | $3,472 |
During peak sales (10x traffic):
| Monthly Revenue | Peak Revenue per Min | 30-min Peak Outage |
|---|---|---|
| $100,000 | $23.15 | $694 |
| $500,000 | $115.74 | $3,472 |
| $1,000,000 | $231.48 | $6,944 |
| $5,000,000 | $1,157.41 | $34,722 |
And that's just the immediate revenue loss.
Hidden costs of e-commerce downtime
Lost customer lifetime value: A customer who bounces during a bad experience may never return. If your average CLV is $200, losing 100 customers costs $20,000 in future revenue.
Increased cart abandonment: Even after you're back up, trust is damaged. Cart abandonment rates can stay elevated for hours.
SEO penalties: Extended downtime causes Google to temporarily de-rank your pages. Recovery can take days or weeks.
Ad spend waste: If you're running paid campaigns during an outage, you're paying for traffic that can't convert.
Support costs: Dozens of tickets from confused customers wondering if their order went through.
Monitoring costs a few dollars a month. A single prevented outage pays for years of monitoring.
How Webalert Helps E-commerce Sites
Webalert was built with reliability-critical sites in mind:
Monitor your entire checkout funnel
Set up monitors for each step of your purchase flow. Know immediately when any step fails — not just the final payment.
1-minute check intervals
E-commerce can't wait 5 minutes to find out about an outage. With 1-minute checks, you'll know within 60 seconds when something breaks.
Instant multi-channel alerts
Get notified via email, SMS, or both. Route critical alerts (checkout, payment) to SMS and less urgent issues to email.
Response time tracking
See exactly how fast your pages respond. Catch performance degradation before it becomes an outage.
Public status page
When issues do occur, communicate proactively. A status page builds trust and reduces support tickets during incidents.
Simple setup, no complexity
Add a monitor in seconds. No agents to install, no complex configuration. Just enter your URL and start monitoring.
Quick E-commerce Monitoring Audit
Ask yourself:
- Are you monitoring your checkout flow, or just your homepage?
- Do you know within 1 minute when your payment processing fails?
- Are your alert thresholds appropriate for e-commerce (not generic defaults)?
- Do you have a plan for Black Friday and peak sales periods?
- When was the last time you tested your incident response process?
If you hesitated on any of these, you're leaving revenue on the table — and risking much worse during your next traffic spike.
Final Thoughts
E-commerce monitoring isn't optional. It's insurance.
Every minute your store is down costs real money. Every slow page leaks conversions. Every failed checkout is a customer who might never come back.
The good news? This is entirely preventable.
With proper monitoring, you'll catch issues in seconds instead of minutes. You'll know about problems before your customers tweet about them. And you'll go into peak sales periods with confidence instead of anxiety.
Don't wait until Black Friday to find out your checkout is broken.
Start monitoring today.
Ready to protect your e-commerce revenue?
Start monitoring your store free with Webalert →
1-minute checks. Instant alerts. Peace of mind during every sale.