Survey: One in four e-commerce retailers has lost data

E-commerce retailers are learning from failures to back up their site data.

According to the Rewind 2020 Data Protection Survey, all respondents had a data backup strategy, but nearly 60% had never backed up their web content before their current system. Nine percent had inherently trusted their e-commerce platform to back up data.

The survey of 271 North American e-commerce retailers using the Shopify or BigCommerce platforms also revealed the top reasons respondents have for implementing a backup system are protecting their online shop from risks and/or peace of mind (39%), because it was recommended by their e-platform and/or good reviews (22%), and because it is easy and/or involves less work than their existing backup method (12%).

The study also examined the frequency and impact of data loss for e-commerce retailers. One in four respondents had lost critical content that needed to be restored. Of those, 28% spent zero to five hours recovering lost data, 13% took six to 25 hours and 8% never fully recovered it. More than half (52%) were unsure how long recovery of lost data took.

Products and images (23%) were the type of data most frequently lost, followed by orders (8%) and pages (7%). Respondent concerns over the types of data they could lose paralleled actual loss frequency, with 94% citing product and images as the most important data to protect, followed by customers and orders (88%) and pages (81%).

The most common impacts suffered by respondents who experienced a data loss were time/labor wasted rebuilding a site (91%), loss of sales/orders/revenue (89%), and loss of reputation/unhappy customers (20%).