Shopify could use a transparency overhaul with its downtime reporting.

Anecdotally, uptime for its stores is pretty good. There were some intermittent challenges earlier this year, but those have largely seemed to recover.

It's admin UI, however, is another story. While I'm not a human monitor, there's not a week that goes by without a few seconds or minutes of downtime in some part of the Shopify admin. So there's that.

Also, Shopify has not followed Salesforce into the light of transparency. Salesforce, which practically invented the SaaS business model, early on decided that transparency with uptime and history is important.

As a result, even Shopify staff you ask often don't know if a downtime happened or can verify it for you.

I think this is an area they could use a ton of improvement, and take lessons from other providers. Attached are some screenshots of what I mean and the comparison.

The final one is Shopify. Virtually no information other than what is happening this second. Salesforce provides details, history, search, and incident logs!

Could be better.

I knew Victor Castro would have something to say about this (he did): “The most frustrating part is that they used to have full transparency on all systems and a historical view for each. Until recently, when they changed to this view that supposedly looks at your store alone. In my experience, it's never been accurate unless we are completely down. Is this change a way to limit any SLA liability exposure? Is it massive technology deficiency? Do you believe that their internal team doesn't know when their services are down? I'm not sure there are any good answers to these questions. I've been hoping that someone on their engineering team could shed some light on this.”

When Jordan Brannon responded by saying that he’s always thought the Shopify folks “assume most merchants won't know, and for sales prospects it appears less concerning” Victor replied “more importantly, shareholders and investors also won't know. I wonder if this is part of Tobi's move faster, break things mode. It’s easier to do when people don't see what’s breaking and how often.” Great points all around.

Christopher Davy echoed Victor’s thoughts on “move faster, break things,” saying “We can add that until early this year, Shopify status page was displaying an history timeline. The fact that they removed it is no good for transparency as well... And remember what Tobi said during Q1 earnings call (he was referring to the pandemic and the need to change their release plans): ‘I’ve asked the company to lower its minimum acceptable quality bar [...] because there’s only 24 hours in the day. So that we can launch things.’”

As I said, could be better.