Menu
No data was found
Whether you’re a one-person operation or a growing business with a full team, we’re here to help. Get in touch and let’s talk about what we can do for you.
Whether you’re a one-person operation or a growing business with a full team, we’re here to help. Get in touch and let’s talk about what we can do for you.
Your shop is a website, a till and a stock system that all have to agree with each other.
Retail has more single points of failure than almost any business of its size, and most of them are quiet. A domain renewal nobody owns. An SSL certificate that expires on a Sunday. A plugin update that breaks the checkout. A stock sync that stops without telling anyone, so you keep selling something you haven’t got. This page is about the things that actually take retailers offline, and about the one rule that matters more than any of them: don’t change anything in November.
Nobody owns the domain, and that’s a disaster waiting. In a surprising number of retail businesses, the domain, the DNS and sometimes the hosting sit in an account belonging to a web developer who stopped working with them years ago. Everything is fine until a renewal, a change or a fallout, at which point the shop goes dark and there’s no quick fix.
Your checkout is the target. Attackers inject code into e-commerce sites to skim card details as customers type them, usually through an out of date plugin or theme rather than anything clever. It runs silently, the site looks normal, and you find out from your payment provider. For a small retailer that’s a fundamentally business threatening event.
Integrations drift apart. Website, till, stock, accounts and marketplaces all talk to each other, and when one link stops, nothing crashes. You just quietly oversell, or stop selling stock you’re holding, and find out from a customer complaint or a stock count.
And the worst possible time to touch anything is the only time it matters. Black Friday through to January is where the year’s margin lives. It’s also when most retailers are least able to absorb a problem, and when the temptation to make one last change is highest.
Sales don’t wait. Every minute the till or the checkout is down is revenue you don’t get back, and in Q4 it’s multiplied.
Retail downtime is immediately measurable, which is unusual and uncomfortable. It’s also reputational in a way that other sectors escape, because customers see it happen. A checkout that errors, a site that’s slow, a card machine that won’t connect: all of it happens in front of the person deciding whether to buy from you again.
The data side is just as serious. You hold customer names, addresses, order histories and marketing lists. A breach means telling all of them, and in retail word travels.
Almost all of it is preventable with unglamorous groundwork. Own your own domain and DNS. Keep the platform and its plugins current. Monitor the integrations so failures announce themselves. Protect the accounts that can change your website or your prices. Then freeze everything through peak and trade in peace.
Domain, DNS, hosting and platform accounts in your name, under your control, documented. If they currently sit with a former developer or an agency, recovering them is one of the first things we’d do. Hosting and web development both sit within our group, so whether you need somewhere better to host or someone to work on the site itself, that’s one relationship rather than a handover between strangers.
Keeping the platform, themes and plugins patched, controlling who can change what on your site, and protecting the admin accounts that could alter your prices or your payment flow.
Everything that needs doing gets done before the end of October. From then until the January sales are over, nothing changes unless it’s broken. Written down and agreed, so nobody gets talked into a quick tweak in week two of December.
Two minutes, a handful of questions, covering the things that actually cause retail outages. Most retailers find at least one answer they don’t like.
That split is deliberate. Selling online means you hold more customer data, you have a public facing platform that attackers probe constantly, and you carry card payment flows through your own site. Professional gives you the strongest security stack we offer plus Cyber Essentials, which is increasingly asked for by wholesale customers and marketplaces as well as being worth having on its own merits.
Essential covers complete cloud and email security, real Microsoft 365 backup, device security and your Microsoft 365 Business Premium licence, and it’s a solid position for a bricks and mortar shop whose website is a shop window rather than a checkout.
Either way, the domain, DNS and platform question comes first, because it’s the thing that can take you offline hardest and it’s usually free to put right.
The Professional IT Support Service is for businesses that want the best — complete IT support, the strongest security we offer, and Cyber Essentials tools and certification support all in one package. If you need to protect your reputation, meet compliance requirements, and have confidence your IT is in safe hands, this is it.
Key Features
Every package is unlimited support with no ticket caps and no per-incident charges. Rolling monthly terms are available, longer terms carry a discount, and not-for-profit pricing applies across the range. Current prices are on the package pages.
Not your developer’s, not your agency’s, not an email address nobody checks. With the renewal on a card that won’t expire and a reminder that reaches a human.
An expired certificate puts a browser warning in front of every customer, and it always happens at a weekend.
Themes and plugins are where e-commerce sites get compromised. Out of date extensions are the single most common route in.
Platform admin, hosting, domain registrar, payment gateway and marketing tools. These accounts are worth more to an attacker than your email.
Stock, orders and marketplace links should tell you when they stop, rather than waiting for a customer to notice.
Dates agreed in September, honoured by everyone including your web developer.
This is the part that stops most people, and it’s usually smaller than imagined.
Domain, DNS, hosting, platform, gateway and marketplace accounts. This is usually the most revealing hour of the whole process and it’s where we’d start. No obligation, findings in writing.
Ownership recovered and documented, access properly controlled, and multi-factor authentication on everything that matters.
Patching, backups, monitoring and device security, scheduled so it’s finished well before your peak rather than during it.
Unlimited support Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, monitoring through the week, and a change freeze through your trading peak.
Questions retailers ask us
Straight answer: our standard support is Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, unless you’ve arranged out of hours cover with us separately. We’d rather tell you that plainly than let you assume otherwise.
What we do instead is put the effort where it changes the outcome: everything patched, tested and documented before peak, a freeze on changes while you’re trading hard, and monitoring so problems are caught early rather than discovered by a customer. If your business genuinely needs weekend or seasonal cover on top of that, it can be arranged, and we’ll tell you honestly whether we think it’s worth it for your setup.
You should, in an account in your business’s name that at least two people can reach. If yours currently sits with a developer or agency, we’d treat recovering it as the first job, and it’s usually straightforward while relations are good.
Yes, and between us we can cover the whole thing. On the IT side we look after everything around the platform: hosting, domain, DNS, certificates, the accounts that control them, and the devices and email your team uses. For the site itself, we have a marketing team in the group who build and develop websites, so design, development and changes to the shop can sit with us too.
If you already have a web developer you’re happy with, that’s completely fine and we’ll work alongside them rather than trying to replace them. We’ll tell you honestly which jobs are ours, which are theirs, and which could go either way.
Yes, and it’s more common than most retailers realise. Malicious code gets injected through an out of date plugin or theme and quietly captures card details as customers type them. The defence is unglamorous: keep the platform current, control who can publish changes, and protect the admin accounts properly.
Usually an integration that has silently stopped or is falling behind. Worth monitoring rather than reconciling by hand, because the cost shows up as oversells and cancelled orders rather than as an IT problem.
Yes, hosting sits within the group. We’ll also tell you when your current hosting is fine and moving would just be change for its own sake.
Individual accounts, the right permissions, and a leaver process that actually runs in January. Seasonal staff are a normal part of retail and the risk is entirely manageable, but it does need a process rather than goodwill.
We don’t work to fixed SLA response times. Within our working hours we work on priority, so a shop that can’t take payment is dealt with ahead of something trivial rather than waiting its turn in a contractual queue.
No. You can take any package on a rolling monthly term. Longer terms carry a discount, and the current rates are on each package page, but that’s your choice, not a condition.
We look after shops, online retailers and multi-channel businesses across Bristol, Bath, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Somerset and Swindon, with remote support anywhere in the UK. We’re an NCSC Assured Service Provider, Cyber Essentials Plus certified, and ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 accredited.
Start with an hour working out who actually owns your domain, your hosting and your platform. It’s the cheapest useful thing you can do, and you’ll have the answer whether or not you work with us.
There is nothing more annoying than an IT glitch that stops you working efficiently. However, knowing you have access to immediate attention to the glitch and a solution to it, is very reassuring and that is provided by We Do Your IT. We have so appreciated the availability and response given by the team at We Do Your IT, enabling us to remain a productive firm.
Richard Sharp – Sharp Family Law