A makeup artist used her social account as a portfolio and a way for clients to book her services. When the account was suspended, those functions went with it. The Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman describes the case on its website: more than 8,000 followers, damage to the business and an intervention that restored access in under two weeks. The account is unnamed and the incident undated.
Two weeks can sound like a good outcome in a dispute. It can feel very different inside a business that needs bookings. Her bookings and portfolio both depended on that account remaining available.
A channel that brings in sales is worth spending money on. It also belongs in the owner’s plans for what could go wrong. Some of the money it brings in should help build another route to customers who want to hear from the business. The time to do that is while the account is still working.
A channel can control more than discovery
A platform may introduce a customer, host the conversation, display proof of the seller’s work and process the transaction. Each addition makes the service more useful. Each can also make it harder to leave or cope with lost access.
This is why counting followers misses the commercial question. A business can retain the skills, stock and equipment needed to fulfill an order while losing the place where customers know to ask for one. The product is still as good as it was. The route to buying it has broken.
Search dependence can produce a related problem. A business may control its website and still rely on one search engine for most new customers. Keeping the site online would not by itself replace that flow. A marketplace seller may face another version, with reputation, discovery and payment tied to the same operator.
The ombudsman’s 2025-26 figures record 925 digital-platform disputes, up from 317 in the year before. Those numbers describe the Australian businesses that reached its assistance process. They do not establish a platform failure rate or the likelihood that any particular seller will lose an account. Handling those disputes is real work for an institution that helps small businesses.
An owner can assess this risk by looking at sales:
- How much profitable business would disappear during an interruption?
- How long could the business carry its regular costs?
- Would existing customers know another way to reach it?
There is no universal percentage at which a channel becomes dangerously large. A firm with repeat customers who can contact it directly faces a different exposure from one whose orders begin and end inside an account. The same share of sales can conceal very different abilities to recover.
Focus can be sensible
The case for concentration is strong, particularly early in a business’s life. A small team can do one channel well or several channels badly. Maintaining an unused backup account has a cost, and that cost includes time taken from the place where customers already are.
Founder Mihir Thakkar described the benefits and risks of building Retentionly on Shopify in July 2026. In his account, the platform helped the product reach more than 3,000 merchants while supplying tools to run the business and build the product. It also set rules for how merchants could find the app and for its use of data and billing. The reach figure is his own report, but the tradeoff is clear: accepting dependence can make a business possible sooner.
An owner who chooses that tradeoff has not necessarily made a mistake. Rebuilding every function independently could consume the money needed to develop the product. Nor is it obvious that splitting an advertising budget across several mediocre channels makes a company safer. Less concentration can come with less profit and less room to absorb trouble.
The better response is to attach a small obligation to a channel’s success. As it begins to work, use some of the resulting time or money to keep another way of doing business open. The investment should fit the risk and the company’s capacity. It need not become a second marketing operation of equal size.
During an interruption, the alternative should let the business stay in touch with some customers and keep taking orders. It does not have to outperform the best channel on an ordinary day to be worth maintaining.
Build a route that survives an interruption
The first constraint is permission. A customer who bought once has not necessarily agreed to receive ongoing marketing. Etsy’s seller policy, for example, does not permit sellers to treat a buyer’s transaction email as automatic consent for a mailing list. It also places restrictions on moving transactions off its platform. A seller has to build that direct link within the rules and give the customer a real choice.
That takes more patience than exporting a spreadsheet. It also creates a more meaningful asset: people who have knowingly chosen a way to hear from the business again. Their agreement is what makes that continued contact possible.
A website can give those people a stable place to find the business. It still depends on hosting, payment services and other providers. An email list depends on delivery infrastructure. Both routes still rely on other companies. The useful question is whether the backup will still work when the main channel does not.
Consider a small test while everything is working. Assume the account that brings in most new customers is out of reach for several days. Leave it alone; there is no need to interrupt actual sales. Work through what would happen next using the records and systems already in place.
Use that interruption test to check whether business could continue:
- Could a returning customer find a current description of the service somewhere else?
- Could the business get in touch with customers who had agreed to that contact?
- Could it receive an order, take payment and fulfill the promise without relying on the unavailable account?
A backup that requires logging in through the same blocked service may fail at the first step.
The exercise can expose a small repair: an outdated contact page, missing records, an untested payment route. It can also reveal that the supposed alternative exists only as an intention. Knowing that while money is still coming in gives the owner time to choose a response they can afford.
The best channel can keep doing what made it valuable. Meanwhile, one customer should be able to find the other route, make contact and place an order. That successful transaction would tell the business more about its resilience than another account opened and forgotten.
