Whats and Whys of eCommerce Data Backup?

Posted by
Anastasia Barytska

Updated December 21, 2023

The online store is often considered the most valuable asset for each eCommerce business. Therefore, they intend to consider the stores’ themes, products, or blog articles constantly. That makes your online store the basis for all your eCommerce activities. And your company will suffer when something wrong happens to the online store. 

In this case, there is a need to provide the appropriate eCommerce data backup to protect your store. After all, numerous eCommerce stores can suffer inoperability caused by human errors, malware attacks, accidental information deletion, or rogue applications. Such cases provoke relevant undesirable changes and can even lead to deleting your online store. 

To avoid that, popular eCommerce providers perform a Shopify backup or a BigCommerce backup to protect their platforms. These backups can become helpful when natural disasters or other unexpected events like server crashing occur. On the other hand, if your company has no website backup, your lost information will not recover. It means that you will have to rebuild your online store to its previous state. 

Modern business owners should understand data backup advantages and consider this practice a top priority. That is because when your eCommerce store is down, you can recover it quickly and save thousands of dollars. 

What Is an eCommerce Backup? Why Do You Need It?

Each eCommerce store contains critical business and customer information it has to protect reliably. But at the same time, it is not as easy as it may appear. 

Data loss can be provoked by different factors, such as human errors or deliberate information breaches. Regardless of the cause, your organization can lose all necessary data, which will be incredibly harmful to your business. 

Thus, purchasing a backup tool is an efficient approach to ensure that your company has constant access to its data. Despite the possible threats and circumstances, you get a chance to copy your valuable information to the cloud. The ability to access necessary documents from anywhere at any time is among the key benefits of cloud backup.

In addition, you will always have copies of files, images, passwords, and financial information securely kept in the cloud environment. Nowadays, there are many various backup solutions you can implement for appropriate data protection. After all, choosing the most suitable tool is a critical part of your backup planning since it helps secure your eCommerce operations. That allows your company not only to protect your information from damage or loss but ensures the efficient performance of your online store. 

So why are backups important? First, they help ensure your business has all valuable information, including your website, backed up. Also, they reduce the risk of possible data loss since you have several copies kept in different storage. Finally, one of the main advantages of data backup is the opportunity to restore the required information. 

Here, we have created a small list of the major reasons why you have to backup your eCommerce store: 

1. Human errors are a more common issue than you may admit. 
2. Bulk imports are often flawed. 
3. Coding-related errors can affect your online store, especially themes. 
4. Many third-party applications are not reliable enough. 
5. There can be either internal or external sources of different malware attacks.
6. You cannot vet each contractor. 
7. Cybercriminals are targeting more small and medium-sized businesses than before. 

What eCommerce Data Should You Back up?

Of course, you should intend to backup the maximum possible amount of information on your website. That makes complete backups incredibly important, especially because one item on your eCommerce store is often connected with many others. For example, a single product can relate to different categories and collections, along with thousands of orders, clients, discounts, etc. In the case of BigCommerce, several products cannot even exist without falling under a relevant category. 

Therefore, some of the key components of your online store to backup are the following: 

• Databases. If you have created your eCommerce store using BigCommerce, you ensure that your database is automatically backed up. But if your website is self-hosted, your organization must perform an eCommerce backup. 
• Code. You need to backup all custom codes your developers have added to the store or themes. 
• Asset directory. Asset directories are also known as media libraries. Here, you can upload images, video files, and other assets necessary for your online store. 
• Themes. Probably you know that all eCommerce website builders provide customizable themes. For instance, BigCommerce offers two types of such themes - Stencil and Blueprint. Blueprint themes serve as original templates widely used by many merchants. But you cannot access them using BigCommerce’s API, which is possible with Stencil themes. Unfortunately, that makes it difficult for relevant backup plugins to access such information. 
• Products and content. With blog articles, pages, product descriptions, and other content pieces, clients can find your eCommerce store via search engines. 
• Inventory, orders, and client data. Your business should have all customers’ orders, and inventory backed up to meet accounting and liability purposes. 

When to Backup Your eCommerce Data?

Almost every type of backup means straining your server and slowing down the overall performance. So, many businesses perform backups during off-hours because their online stores are not very busy then. Although such a strategy can work well, there are also some critical things to consider.

1. If your backup process is quite aggressive, it can make your eCommerce store unresponsive. That will affect the shoppers’ ability to purchase desired products. 
2. If your online store sells goods worldwide, there can be no off-hours. 
3. Your organization can schedule backups at night only one time per day. That can be acceptable but only when losing a full day of information is also a fine risk. 

There is an effective alternative. You can constantly back up your eCommerce store. You should save some historical copies of your data. Thus, a backup of bad information will not change the good. 

When and Why to Restore Your eCommerce Data?

Below, we briefly describe some top cases when your organization should restore your eCommerce data.

• Human errors. Experts claim that man-made disasters (in other words, human errors) serve as the most significant cause of information loss. Undoubtedly, employees or freelancers working on your online store have no ill intent. However, human mistakes often happen, and the relevant outcomes can be catastrophic. 
• Theme code editing. Perhaps the most accessible approach to breaking your eCommerce store is to make a small code-related mistake. Thus, when you make some edits or other customizations using your theme code, you should have an opportunity to reverse relevant changes. From the ideal viewpoint, providing a staging site to test code changes is critical. After that, you can publish them on your live website.
• App integrations. Implementing third-party apps allows your organization to improve various functionalities of its online store. That includes marketing, inventory management, sales, and many others. For example, BigCommerce provides clients with hundreds of applications. But there is no guarantee that such apps will perform properly with your eCommerce website and information. 

In addition, when you integrate third-party software, you must consider permissions granted to these apps. Finally, you should have a backup if the installed app makes several undesirable changes. 

• Ill-intentioned staff or contractors. You may not think about the potential harm caused by your personnel or contractors. But unfortunately, there can be cases when they hurt your business. For example, since your employees can access your online store backend, they can delete critical files. 
• Ransomware attacks. The available eCommerce providers take appropriate measures to protect against various malware attacks. However, cybercriminals can also target individual accounts, which is a great challenge to struggle with. 
• CSV imports. Your organization can use bulk imports to provide your website with bulk edits. But CSV files can cause harm even if one column is inaccurate. 

Summing up

The potential data loss is among the most critical questions to consider if you run an eCommerce business. Data loss can be a result of typical human errors to ransomware attacks or malfunctions of different third-party applications. That will cost your organization time, money, and client loyalty. Therefore, you should understand the importance of data backup and perform it regularly to avoid such negative occasions.