Case study: Natural Patch – discovering that traditional uptime monitoring is not enough in eCommerce
From mosquitos to profitability
Natural Patch was born on a vacation. While Michael’s kids were playing on the beach, the sound of mosquitoes and the inevitable swelling, blemishes, and itchiness held them back from the full enjoyment of that limited time. The innovation was sparked as Michael watched his kids rubbing citronella candle wax on their clothes to counteract the mosquitos.
Starting with patches for mosquito repellent, the company quickly set out to make life better for kids in other areas, such as sleep, relaxation, focus, cravings, and allergy relief by using all-natural remedies. Since launch, the patches have been embraced by parents around the world, and even caught the attention of Kim Kardashian who endorsed the product.
Online store monitoring
Michael is no stranger to ecommerce and has been working in the industry for some time, building dropshipping stores and Shopify apps.
With Natural Patch, he started using the same tools he’d been using for years to monitor uptime, such as Pingdom, and Better Uptime. These worked great for assessing the availability of domains, but this toolset was lacking critical insights into the actual functionality of his online store, and the platform it runs on.
One recent downtime event occurred when a theme change caused all the website content between the header and footer to disappear. This was not immediately apparent to the team and was only discovered much later, once a five-figure amount of revenue was already lost.
This issue motivated Michael to search for a better solution, which is when he came across Uptime. Working with the Uptime team, Michael was able to record 9 test flows that covered all the key customer journeys and functionality on his online store. He can now rest easy knowing that if his site content disappeared, he’d be the first to know about it.
Here’s what Michael has to say about Uptime:
Knowing if a domain or Shopify in general is up or down is important. But you want to know what is even more important? Our customer flows: from landing on a page, to selecting variants, adding to cart and more. Uptime is exceptionally easy and remarkably valuable to us. We were using tools to monitor our store but nothing had the ability to replicate flows, track Shopify status alerts, and notify various teams in Slack/email of a problem. Knowing very quickly if we have broken something is priceless.
– Michael Jankie, Founder @ Natural Patch
Get some peace of mind
Uptime’s goal is to give you peace of mind knowing someone is always monitoring your online store. If your team wants to get some peace of mind, install the app now for free or book time with us and we can help you get started!
