An hour offline sounds survivable. A bit of downtime, a few apologies, and back to normal by lunch. But the real impact from a single hour of lost connectivity is almost always bigger than the takings you missed, because the costs don’t stop when the connection comes back.
Here’s what that hour actually looks like on the shop floor, and why “we’ll just ride it out” is a more expensive plan than it seems.
The cost on the till
Start with the obvious. With cash now used for well under half of UK retail transactions, most of your sales depend on card and contactless, which require connectivity. When the line drops, the EPOS and payment terminals go with it. Industry estimates in 2023, UK businesses lost £3.7 billion annually due to internet outages. That’s estimated to be a loss of around £5,000-£20,000 per hour for a single store. Every minute offline is a minute you can’t take money.
It’s not just the sales in the building. If click-and-collect, online orders, and stock lookups
all sit on the same connection. One outage can stall several revenue streams at once.
The costs that aren’t on the till
This is where the “true” cost lives. During that hour, your staff are still being paid, but they can’t sell, so wages become another cost rather than a productive spend. Queues build. Customers who came in to buy walk out empty-handed, and a large share of shoppers are hesitant to come back after a frustrating experience. A few of them will say so publicly, on Google or social, where the damage outlives the outage.
Then there’s the recovery tail: reconciling failed transactions, re-processing orders, calming annoyed customers and chasing the cause. The connection is restored in an hour; the disruption rolls on for the rest of the day.
Why the real figure compounds
Add it up, and a single hour isn’t “an hour of lost sales.” It’s lost sales, plus idle wages, plus abandoned baskets, plus reputational drag, plus recovery time. If outages become a pattern, it starts to shape whether customers trust you at all.
The fix is cheaper than the risk
This is a solvable problem. Automatic failover keeps you trading by switching seamlessly to a backup connection the moment your primary line fails, usually before staff or customers even notice. Against the cost of even one lost hour at peak, resilient connectivity isn’t an overhead. It’s insurance that pays for itself the first time it’s needed.
Optinet keeps retailers trading with fast primary connectivity and automatic failover built in — so an outage never reaches your customers. See how failover protects your stores: Contact us