E-commerce firms thrive under RapidSpike’s monitoring shield

A pivot to online during Covid is a main cause. “But RapidSpike has your back – that’s our message to businesses and their customers,” declares chief executive Gav Winter of the Leeds-based company whose portfolio includes major names such as William Hill, Kurt Geiger, White Stuff and US retailer Helen of Troy, owner of Vicks and Oxo.

“Our unique monitoring solutions focus on three website health fundamentals – performance, reliability and security,” he says. “Wrapped together they minimise disruption, convert into sales and protect customer loyalty.”  

With a £1million turnover forecast for this year, the company is scaling its platform, expanding its 17-strong team and targeting more blue-chip e-commerce brands following a £1m investment from Praetura Ventures.

“Every minute, 24/7, we collect, aggregate and record data points from multiple website sources, user journeys, reliability, web vitals, page structure and more,” explains Winter. 

“We then process, analyse and interpret those data points, accessible through a single dashboard where customers can configure, visualise and manage monitoring. Every customer has their own customisable plan.” 

Launched in 2015 by security experts Robin Hill and Andrew Mason to challenge an £8 billion-plus marketplace with a low cost, high-value product, Winter joined in 2018 to “create a runway to success,” he says.

“We had a feature-heavy, data-rich platform, but needed a new intelligence layer to decipher key insights.

“At first customers wanted basic reliability, then we transitioned to greater security and most recently demand for performance has increased.  

“The world of websites is more complex than ever and marginal gains count.”

Able to detect security issues and monitor website performance for any site, via any browser or device, RapidSpike’s global capability means it can serve a business no matter where it is located. 

Using servers throughout the world, a client’s own ones can also be monitored, a service that alerts them when the server is down or threatened by a security breach.

Prices start at £300 per year for startups with one site and low data. The more customer data, the bigger the package needed, however, and costs for the biggest enterprises, with multiple websites and thousands of customers, are £125 per month or £1,500 per year.

“Our Synthetic User Journey Monitoring is one of our most successful products so businesses can create the best user journeys for their customers,” adds Winter.

“One of our clients has improved their website performance by 12 per cent which translates into a £4 million increase in revenues.”

Last year remote purchase fraud, where a criminal uses stolen card details, rose 12 per cent to 4.5 million cases.  

RapidSpike’s Magecart Attack Detection tracker tool is also proving its worth, reducing detection time by 98 per cent as it swoops on threats and plugs blindspots. 

Active on all a company’s websites, in the past year for one client alone it has protected its 17 million users.

Web skimming creating fake checkouts or malicious code hidden behind images, domain spoofing — where hackers infiltrate genuine sites and redirect information from customers, formjacking — where hackers insert malicious code often on payment pages that customers are totally unaware of, along with supply chain assaults are now all part of the cyber attackers’ weaponry.

“Website identity and payment theft will continue to grow,” predicts Winter. 

“One of businesses’ biggest vulnerabilities comes from third parties through the back door such as social media and geo-location tools, 95 per cent of all successful attacks come from human error.  

“The responsibility is not only on consumers to be cautious but big business too. It should not be a once a year box-ticking exercise for them. Hackers change tactics all the time. We process billions of bits of information every second to prevent that.”

In mid-2022 another further funding raise could be on the cards for RapidSpike “because faster, safer and more reliable websites are better for everyone,” says Winter, “and improvement never stops”.