Your store stays up
Why an outage somewhere in our business does not stop your store taking an order.
Your store does not ask anything else for permission to sell.
Everything a shopper sees — the catalogue, the prices, the pictures, the categories — is held by the store itself. Nothing is fetched from elsewhere while somebody is waiting for a page. So a problem anywhere else in our business is a problem for us, not for your customers.
A sale is finished when it is paid for
The moment an order is written down and the card is authorised, the sale is complete. Everything after that — getting it into production, putting a number on it, making it — is our paperwork, and none of it can undo a sale that already happened.
That is the whole design, in one sentence: an outage delays paperwork; it never costs a sale.
Nothing waits on something that might be down
A handful of things genuinely are live, and every one of them has an answer for when it fails.
| When we ask for | And cannot get it |
|---|---|
| Stock levels | The last known number is shown with its age, and it disappears once too old to trust. It never blocks a checkout. |
| Shipping rates | We fall back to the store's own rate table, and the order records which one it used. |
| Product images | They are served from a content network, not fetched on demand at all. |
| Tax | Never a live call. It is a standard rule the platform applies itself. |
| The order reaching production | Queued and retried until it lands. It cannot be lost, and it cannot be entered twice. |
We would rather say nothing than guess
You will notice this everywhere once you look for it. A stock badge vanishes rather than showing a stale number as a current one. A shipment status stays blank until we have actually been told. A restock date shows a dash rather than an estimate we do not have. An order number is either the real one or a plain statement that it is coming.
A number that is wrong is worse than a number that is missing, because somebody acts on it.