How Downtime Costs E-Commerce Sales: A Data-Driven Analysis

A 10-minute outage during Black Friday can cost more than a year of monitoring. Here's the data.

The True Cost of Downtime

Gartner estimates the average cost of IT downtime at $5,600 per minute. For e-commerce, the stakes are even higher during peak sales periods.

Hidden Costs Beyond Lost Sales

• Abandoned carts: Users who can't checkout rarely return
• SEO penalties: Google monitors availability for rankings
• Brand damage: One tweet about your outage reaches thousands
• Ad waste: Paid traffic hitting a dead page = money burned

ROI of Proactive Monitoring

At $5/month, a single prevented outage makes monitoring 100x ROI-positive. The question isn't whether you can afford monitoring—it's whether you can afford not to have it.