What percentage of revenue is from ecommerce / online advertising?
The higher this percentage, the more an hour of downtime costs, and the more of your exposure sits on a public-facing system.
What the carrier is actually asking
The carrier is asking what share of revenue comes through online channels, including ecommerce and online advertising. It is measuring dependence on internet-facing systems.
Why it is underwritten
Online revenue stops the moment the site does, which makes business interruption immediate and measurable. It also concentrates exposure on public-facing infrastructure and, where cards are processed, on payment data. Carriers price both effects.
Where the answer lives in Microsoft 365, Entra ID, and Azure
Revenue attribution comes from your finance systems.
| Platform | Where the setting lives | What has to be true |
|---|---|---|
| Finance | Revenue by channel for the period | A supportable split between online and other channels. Attested |
| Platform | The ecommerce platform and its hosting model | Whether the platform is hosted by a vendor or by you, which determines who patches it |
| Payments | How card data is handled in the online flow | Consistency with the payment outsourcing answer |
| Availability | Redundancy and failover for the revenue-generating platform | Design that limits outage duration for the systems carrying revenue |
| Web | Third-party scripts running on transaction pages | Script inventory, since compromised scripts on payment pages are a recurring loss source |
A high ecommerce share concentrates risk on the checkout page, and that page typically loads scripts from analytics, chat, and advertising vendors. A compromise of any of them can skim card data without touching your servers. Script integrity controls are the answer, and few applications ask about them directly.
What a defensible yes requires
- The percentage is supported by revenue reporting.
- The platform hosting model and patch responsibility are known.
- Payment handling is consistent with the card processing answer.
- The revenue-generating platform has availability design proportionate to its importance.
- Third-party scripts on transaction pages are inventoried and controlled.
How this answer goes wrong
The percentage is estimated low because online is not how the business thinks of itself, while a majority of orders arrive through the website. The business interruption cover is then sized against the wrong channel mix.
Frequently asked
Does a high percentage hurt?
It raises business interruption exposure and it is not a negative in itself. Carriers write online businesses routinely; they price the dependency.
Does online advertising revenue count?
The question usually asks about it explicitly because it carries similar dependency on availability and on third-party platforms.
What if we sell only through marketplaces?
Say so. Your dependency is on the marketplace rather than on your own infrastructure, which is a different profile worth describing.
How precise should the figure be?
A supportable approximation. The carrier is placing you in a band rather than auditing the split.
Related questions
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