Reply To: The Best Service Website Is BACK!!! [The Deals are Back!!!]

[Peter DeLegge]

On musicman said

That seems like quite a bit of speculation.

While it is entirely possible, it’s also equally plausible they’ve either had some significant IT outage, or ransomware take down a core system.

Given they have a hardware upgrade notification on their website, it would’ve been just as easy for them to have it say they were no longer in business if that were the case.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if it was simply a failed upgrade to their database, or webserver.

Well, in the absence of any communications from Best Service during the 4 days since their site has been down, all a affiliate partner and customer with several hundred dollars of unredeemed software licenses with the retailer can do is speculate why their site has been down so long and they’ve had zero communications with customers or partners during this period. That’s very surprising. Being down for 4 days for an e-commmerce business is a very long period of time. It clearly wasn’t planned, because they would have given a heads up to partners and customers. And now, it’s been four days and their normally responsive affiliate manager is completely unresponsive, and they’ve gone dark on their support forum at KVR.

I’ll summarize the facts:

1) There has been no communication from Best Service out to their affiliate partners or customers during this 4 day period when their website has been down. In this kind of situation — which appears to be a crisis  (4 days for an e-commerce business site to be down is a crisis) — it is highly irregular for any e-commerce business, even the smallest ones to be down that long PLUS have no communications during the same period. A crisis PLUS the company having no communications with the customers, partners and the public — that’s a HUGE red flag. They went dark on their KVR support forum.I have a thread there that no one from the company has responded to, and once again, their affiliate manager, who is normally very responsive, has been unresponsive.

(2) If this were indeed merely planned maintenance, Best Service almost certainly would have notified their partners and customers ahead of time. That’s corporate communications 101.

(3) If Best Service were hacked — as you have speculated — and has been unable to get their website working again — you would expect that they follow basic data backup practices. But even more, you would expect that they would be reassuring their partners and their customers that everything is fine, and give an estimate of when they’ll be back up. Every site with decent traffic — even my little money pit passion project we’re having this conversation on — is regularly attacked by malicious parties. On one occasion, a file was hacked into that damaged the operation of the site. I don’t recall how long this site was down for, but when it was restored, we only lost no more than a couple of hours of data. If this were an e-commerce site and not my passion project / money pit, it would surely have a lot more regular backups.

I’ve been in the digital space since the 90s. I’ve led digital marketing — including corproate websites and e-commerce sites — at three major global brands, and advised far more than 100 companies over the years, including small startups. If this were a mom and pop e-tailer, I could imagine an extended period of their site being down. But Best Service is a pretty decent size player in this space. They are a plugin/sample library developer in addition to being a retailer of many brands. Consequently, I would expect that they know enough to follow smart data backup processes.

As far as your remark that “it would’ve been just as easy for them to have it say they were no longer in business if that were the case,” I don’t think there is any competent business manager that would agree with that statement. If a company is having financial issues, they tend to be very tight-lipped, as it will damage their ability to get credit, their relationships with partners, and their ability to establish new business relationships. Consequently, small, private companies aren’t subject to the kind of regulatory and shareholder pressures publicly traded companies are subject to and tend to disclose far less information about their financial condition.

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