IND-08 · Industry
Retail & Ecommerce
Storefronts, POS, inventory and payments — kept online and secure.
Retail and ecommerce businesses run storefronts, point-of-sale, inventory and warehouse platforms, shipping tools and payment integrations. We support these systems, monitor website and hosting security, and keep the operation online.
Context
What we see in retail & ecommerce
Retail and ecommerce is the sector where downtime has a price you can calculate. A storefront that is slow, a payment integration that quietly stops authorising, a stock feed that fails between the shop and the marketplace — each of those costs money for every hour it lasts, and none of them announce themselves. They are usually discovered by a customer.
The estate is broader than most people expect: the storefront and its hosting, the point-of-sale in the shop, inventory and warehouse tools, shipping integrations, marketplace connections and the payment layer running through all of it. We support that operation as a whole — monitoring the website and hosting, holding the DNS and certificate renewals so nothing expires unnoticed, supporting the applications, and coordinating with the platforms and developers who own individual pieces.
Security here is commercial as much as technical: card details are handled by your payment providers, but the admin accounts, the mailboxes and the endpoints around them are what attackers actually go after. We put managed protection around those. We support payment technology; payment-scheme certification is obtained from qualified specialists.
Failure points
What typically goes wrong
Nobody watching the storefront
Sites go down, certificates expire and checkout breaks quietly at the worst possible time. Monitoring and managed renewals mean you hear it from us rather than from a customer.
Shop and website treated as separate businesses
Point-of-sale, stock and the online store are supported by different people who never talk. We take the whole operation as one estate and coordinate the suppliers behind it.
Admin accounts everyone shares
One storefront login shared with staff, an agency and a former developer. Named accounts, enforced multi-factor authentication and a clean-up of who still has access remove an obvious route in.
Peak season with no plan
The busiest fortnight of the year is not the time to discover the backup path or the escalation route. We agree change freezes and cover before the peak, not during it.
Systems we commonly support
- Ecommerce administration
- Point-of-sale and inventory platforms
- Warehouse and shipping software
- Payment integrations
- Marketplace connections
How we support you
- Application and storefront support
- Website security monitoring
- Hosting and DNS support
- Endpoint and payment security
- Backup and recovery
- Vendor coordination
Responsible scope
We support payment technology; payment-scheme certification is obtained from qualified specialists.
Questions
Good to know
Do you support our website and hosting?
Yes — website security monitoring, hosting support, SSL and DNS management, and recovery are all in scope.
We already have a web developer. Do you replace them?
No. They build; we keep the operation running around them. In practice that means we handle hosting, DNS, certificates, monitoring and security, and coordinate with your developer when a fault belongs in the code.
Will you tell us before something expires?
We manage the renewals we hold — certificates, domains and DNS — and monitor for anything approaching expiry. Unnoticed expiry is one of the most avoidable causes of a shop going offline.
Can you support both the shop floor and the online store?
Yes, and it is better when they are supported together. Point-of-sale, inventory, warehouse tools and the storefront share stock and payment dependencies, so treating them as one estate avoids the gaps between suppliers.
What about the run-up to Christmas or a sale?
We agree a change freeze and the cover you need in advance, so nothing non-essential is touched during the period you cannot afford to lose.
Start here
Managed IT for retail & ecommerce.
Tell us about your systems, sites and specialist software. We assess your environment and scope a managed service around it.