Five alerts every online shop owner should have running

Here is an uncomfortable question: how would you learn that your shop is down? If the honest answer is "a customer would write to me" — you are not alone, and this article is for you. Most small shops find out about problems from the least forgiving monitoring system in existence: an annoyed buyer.

Five alerts cover the majority of real incidents. None of them needs a developer.

1. The site is down

The basic one. An external service pings your site every few minutes from outside and messages you (usually Telegram or email) when it stops answering. UptimeRobot's free tier does this fine. The subtlety: ping the checkout page, not the homepage — a shop where the product pages open but checkout returns a white screen is "up" for most monitors and broken for every customer.

2. Search returns zero results

Silent and expensive. Search breaks quietly: after a plugin update, a theme change, a product import gone wrong. The site looks normal, everything works — except the feature your buyers with intent to purchase use first. If your platform allows it, log searches with zero results and look at that list weekly. A sudden spike means something broke; a steady trickle of the same query means you are missing a product people want.

3. Payments fail

You will not see this in traffic stats: visitors keep coming, carts keep filling, and money silently does not arrive. Make a small test purchase on each payment method at least monthly — and set an alert on your payment provider's webhook errors if it offers one. The day you discover at week's end that Tuesday's payment gateway change broke Wednesday through Sunday, you will not regret the five minutes.

4. A bestseller goes out of stock

Not all stockouts matter — but the one on the product that brings 40% of your revenue does. If your platform has stock thresholds, set an alert for the top five products specifically. The generic "low stock" notification for all products trains you to ignore it; the one about your bestseller will always be worth reading.

5. Domain and SSL certificate expiry

Embarrassing and entirely preventable. A domain that expires takes the shop, the email and the brand with it. Certificates expiring on a Sunday night turn your site into a browser scare page by Monday morning. Both need one alert each, set once a year, and both fail exactly when nobody is watching. Most registrars let you set renewal reminders; domain monitoring tools (ours included — Domain Watch grew from this exact pain) watch it from the outside.

How to set this up without drowning

The failure mode of monitoring is alert fatigue: after the tenth false positive you stop reading notifications, and the system dies. Three rules prevent that:

• One channel for alerts (Telegram is ideal — separate from your personal chats), nothing else.
• Every alert must require action. If you would ignore it twice, tune it or delete it.
• Test each alert by triggering the condition once. An alert that has never fired is a hope, not a monitor.

Set up in an evening, these five checks turn you from the last to know into the first. Your customers will never notice the difference — and that is exactly the point.