The power of SLAs for ensuring your Web Shop’s Quality of Service

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The power of SLAs for ensuring your Web Shop’s Quality of Service

May 17, 2024•6 min

In today's highly competitive game market, players care most about how the game makes them feel – the experience. It's no longer just about making one big sale but securing and retaining new customers. Success comes from growing that loyal player base through lots of small wins. These wins come from creating a fun and memorable experience for your players, which means directing them to a compelling web shop. To succeed with a web selling strategy, it’s important to partner with a strong service team that can help you make the most of monetization, payment methods, and secure transactions. Before teaming up with a new ecommerce solutions partner, it's crucial that they be upfront about what services they provide and what they don't. In addition, both your studio and the partner need to agree on exactly what level of service you expect to launch, maintain, and grow your web shop. Finally, you'll want to make certain they track their performance and can document how well they meet your pre-defined expectations. What is the best way to handle all this? A solid Service-Level Agreement (SLA)—acts like a roadmap for your partnership, ensuring everyone's on the same page about goals, what good looks like, and how you'll measure success.

What is an SLA?

An SLA (Service-Level Agreement) is a contract between a game developer or publisher and a payment service provider or Merchant of Record that lays out the kind of service you can expect to receive. The SLA also includes service level indicator (SLI)— jointly accepted measurements to determine the provider’s effectiveness. Most importantly, an SLA includes what remedies occur if the service provider doesn't meet these agreed-upon standards and what penalties or other actions occur in those cases. While companies often use these types of contracts with all types of outside vendors, this blog post will specifically focus on SLAs between payment providers and game developers/publishers.

2 types of SLAs

Game specific This agreement is tailored to your specific game or studio needs and spells out the level of service you can rely on.

Uptime. This means the duration and schedule of the payment system's availability to players. A good SLA should guarantee at least 99% uptime. Uptime/availability results in the following periods of allowed downtime/unavailability:

Daily: 14m 24s
Weekly: 1h 40m 48s
Monthly: 7h 14m 41s
Quarterly: 21h 44m 4.4s
Yearly: 3d 14h 56m 18s

Performance: This refers to how fast and smoothly transactions will process or the number of successful API requests processed without an error.
Support response: This covers the level of help you'll get from the payment service provider if you encounter any issues. If you run into an issue, you want to know how quickly the provider will respond to your (or your players') problems and how long it will take to resolve them.
Security: Your reputation depends on keeping players' personal and payment information safe. The SLA should explain what security measures are in place to protect your game audience's transaction data from online threats and unauthorized access.
Escalation procedures and terms of cancellation.

General Service This is a more standard agreement that applies to all game companies partnering with the provider. General service SLAs typically cover generic topics and are not tailored to specific clients. API Performance: Imagine APIs silent messengers that keep things running smoothly. The SLA might mention how often these messages get delivered error-free. Connection Limits: This could specify how many players can be connected to the game at the same time.

An example of SLA best practices

Here at Xsolla, we understand that reliable payment processing is crucial for a smooth player experience in your game. That's why we prioritize service uptime and offer robust support and an always-accessible team of experts to keep things running smoothly.

High availability: We aim for a minimum of 99.5% uptime every month. You can check out our performance stats for each product on our status page. Transparency about uptime is a good sign when choosing a payments partner—it shows they're committed to reliability.
Average service stability level of key market players (who disclose this information) is approximately 98%.
Fast incident response: If an issue arises, our Service-Level Agreement (SLA) guarantees a response within 30 minutes for urgent problems. We'll work to fix it within 2 hours and keep you updated every 30 minutes throughout the process.
Responsive customer support: We prioritize fast communication with our developer partners. Our agreement ensures a response within 60 seconds for urgent issues submitted through live chat or other instant channels. You'll get a reply within 24 hours when you contact us by email. This is faster than the industry standard of 24-hour response times for inquiries.

How your game benefits from a strong SLA

An agreement between you and your business partner can be considered successful when your goals are met in a way that syncs with your expectations. A well-defined Service-Level Agreement (SLA) can be a game-changer for your studio. Here's why:

Ensures choosing the right partner. By comparing an SLA with a provider's track record, you can pick a partner that guarantees the performance you and your players need. This ensures a smooth online experience for everyone.
Builds trust and confidence. Clear SLAs set expectations, hold the provider accountable and encourage constant improvement. Game developers trust them even more when they meet or exceed those goals, which translates to happier players.
Keeps things running smoothly. SLAs establish a framework for handling problems quickly and efficiently, including clear communication throughout the process. Following these guidelines minimizes downtime, fixes issues faster, and keeps players engaged.
Maintains efficiency and sparks growth. Meeting SLAs promotes consistent, reliable service delivery. This translates to smoother operations, less downtime, and better experiences for your players. Plus, clear procedures for handling incidents and resolving problems reduce risks associated with service disruptions.

Identifying companies who do not disclose SLAs

Two strong indicators that a prospective partner may not have a customer-focused SLA:

The company declines to accept responsibility for harm caused to a developer or publisher in connection with the use of its products or services; i.e., the company declines/defers/denies any liability;
Poor SLA metrics including low service stability level (uptime) <98%, slow customer support response, and slow incident response,
Lack of sufficient security measures to protect customers' data, etc.

In short, encouraging your prospective commerce partner to write a strong SLA helps you align your service delivery with your business goals and player expectations. This paves the way for a thriving game company with a satisfied, loyal player base.