serotonein
Active Member
I saw it mentioned somewhere else & it clicked something in my brain. There's a high likelihood that this is related to being required to collect state sales tax on each purchase, and their old system not being up to the task (we saw some inkling of that with weird numbers showing up in Sep/Oct). They were probably legit stuck between a rock & a hard place - force the site migration at the worst possible time for a company that relies on additional holiday purchases, or run afoul of Federal law.
That said, they still screwed up royally. Supposedly, based on Paulie's comments on Reddit, their tech team said that full sandboxing wasn't an option. That's convenient. This is something that should have been worked on for a lot longer than they clearly took. They also should have bitten the bullet and just shut the site down for a few days (probably closer to a week given the issues) - send out an email that they're doing a migration and records will be for sale again as soon as they're ready to re-launch. It would have pushed some Exclusives back, and maybe they would have had to give up on a Black Friday sale, but all of those additional sales compounded the errors and introduced new ones. It would have given them time to properly check that the info for each membership was as accurate as possible. A real re-launch with a better, more functional site is also a great excuse for a PR push proving that you're competent and planning to stick around for years to come.
As to the email - for those of us who've been around for a few years or longer, the only surprise is that they actually sent it. When Matt (not so much but on occasion) and Cam were active on the Forums, better communication was pretty much the #1 request. It was cited constantly when they sent out member surveys. If there's one huge failure, it's that they stubbornly refuse to actually listen and try, even a little bit, in that area. While I think there are some responses here that are laughably reading way too much into it, primarily through a lens of their anger, it's also understandable. Especially for long-time members, 2019 was a year in which VMP obliterated any remaining goodwill. There's no trust left to lose. They've likely also lost some newer, previously-excited members with the nonsense of the last few months. However, the other big lesson Matt & Cam never wanted to learn is that the happiness of your long-time members is what sustains you through bad times. Planning to always pick up new customers will eventually plateau as a means of long-term success. Maybe, as Paulie claims, the company is still financially fine but they're undoubtedly in a much worse place right now than they were at this time last year.
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