Andale in a nose-dive

[Parklane64]

Must suck to be Crystal.

http://community.andale.com/groupee/...0107/m/5091047

Snippets:

Bottom line is this: if I have to kiss my business and livelihood good-bye, Andale will have to kiss the nearly $7000 a year I pay them good-bye as well. No back-up system? I have to confess I am guilty of this as well, having trusted so much of my business to Andale instead. If I had a back-up system I would have been out of here long ago and I think Andale knows this.

Crystal....this is absurd. You folks can't tell people the thing will be back SHORTLY..if its going to be 30 or 40 hours from being fixed. Your credibility is shot if this is the best service your firm can offer. I prepaid for a year, I won't be staying once the year is up. Its really too bad, as I like the ease of use, but frankly I have lost faith in your company.

Our company has lost over $7000 this weekened thanks to Andale.And email from our customers is enormous as they have not be able to pay since the 28th.

Someone needs to call me immediatley. Crystal, We have lost over $25 thousand in cash flow from this technical shutdown in the last 2 days. I have 16 employees that are on a stand still today and we can't operate until I get answers.

We are in the same position . Lost around $10,000 in sales over the last few day.

When is this going to be fixed????????? I also really thought it to be unprofessional to blaim it on a software vendor...your customers don't give a crap who is responsible for your problems, only that THEY GET FIXED..NOW!

We're experiencing problems with the Andale checkout system. We have over 100 orders waiting for payment and our customers are spamming our emails saying that they cannot pay via the Andale checkout system. They are getting an Andale error message page. Worse of all, the error message page is not even in English, it's in German!

I HAVE BEEN A CUSTOMER OF ANDALE SINCE I STARTED EBAY IN 1991. I AM OUTRAGED THAT THEY DO NOT HAVE THE COMMON COURTESY TO AT LEAST ANSWER THE PHONE.

To add insult to injury, we just modified all of our Overture and Google advertising to point to our Andale Store instead of our Yahoo Store and eBay Store. Yes, to avoid the commission paid to those entities.

Just from the first of 11 pages of a problem almost a week old.

AuctionBytes

[Parklane64]

Make that a problem over a week old.

[rossshow]

http://news.google.com/news?sourceid...ay&sa=N&tab=wn

[Powerhouse]

Thanks for posting that link, PL. A very interesting read.

[paleryder]

This is more newsworthy than TCW stuff. I would have thought this would have been reported earlier than a week after this meltdown.

Boy, I wonder how they intend to make their customers whole for that mess.

I wouldn't play it on the cheap like some insurance company hanging on to a technical out. Make them whole, throw in some freebies, and FIX the problem so it can't happen again.

[paleryder]

Posted 03 November 2005 12:12 PM

Crystal - First of all, I asked specific questions last evening which to date remains unanswered. Secondly, you failed to answer aztecguitars question on whether this issue could go upwards to a month before being functional again. Now here it is in a nutshell... As mentioned, I worked at Microsoft... you must have done something REALLY REALLY bad to cause this kind of crash. Such as not properly testing your vendors software before integrating it into the system... thus, causing your big CRASH last Friday. While I appreciate your position Crystal in having to deal with all the upset in this forum, we as a customer group are receiving canned answers to everything. Do you mean to tell me (us) the group that to date, with all the questions ask and almost a week later that you don't have these answers yet? Are you kidding me? Your (Tech) team is still working on this issue is all I hear... I sure hope so... My fiance is a tech Crystal... we know the behind the scenes issues at hand... why don't you and your techs get honest with us and let people know that you really screwed up and it more than likely is going to be a month before you are perfect again... or it least functional. Quit dogging each and every one of us and get a tech into this forum to ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS.... BOTTOM LINE.... WILL YOU BE DOWN A MONTH OR MORE CRYSTAL???.... SIMPLE QUESTION AND I WOULD LIKE AN HONEST ANSWER PLEASE! NOT A CANNED ANSWER, NOT A "WE ARE STILL WORKING AND AS SOON AS I KNOW SOMETHING I WILL LET YOU KNOW ANSWER" BUT A TRUE BLUE HONEST ANSWER FOR A CHANGE! THIS IS RIDICULOUS!

[Parklane64]

Some of the gems from 11 pages:

Oooohhh...a couple of these crossed 'parts' are REALLY starting to hurt now...

I'm waiting for the inevitable ultimate advise: "clear your browser's cache and try again"

Actually, that is good advise. It is advisable to clear you cache.

Giving us light at the end of the tunnel was the worst thing they did(and are still doing , mark my words).

boy, am I getting tired of answering emails about the German !!

Do you mean to state that the 'redirect' to the German site responses was intentional????
I've had email after email after email complaining about the German responses. No constructive result, just harm done. Whoever decided that that was an appropriate action to take (the redirect) - go slap 'em for us!!!

Please help us Andale....we are slowing going bankrupt.
As near as we can approximate, we now have over $20,000.00 in outstanding sales that we cannot invoice, much less collect. HELP!!!!

Is there an "Andale Curse" working now???

they have had 3 MAJOR outages that lasted a few days - with absolutely no usability.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but part of me is laughing over this and part of me is very upset...I'm also a seller and lost a lot of business.

Would anyone care to reply constructively, or is it still Romper Room time???

Right now my ONLY concern is to get some cash flow going before the business I've spent five years on implodes. When that's accomplished, THEN I'll decide how to follow up re my pissedoffedness.

Oh and by the way? Guess who told me to do that. An X-Andale Employee!!!

GOOD MORNINGGGGGGGGGG ANDALE! ANOTHER LOST DAY OF PRODUCTIVITY.

Ohh thanks crystal.. everything is totally clear now.

So... Andale is sending UserID in batches of 5 ... IF there are 1.5 milllion users, and I am on the "N" (netexposure) then my turn will be in about 19 years..... hmmmmm...

Make me laugh, You should be first to get fixed? Slap yourself upside the head once for me. I'd love to but can't reach through the mouse.

I think as when customers log into their account they should hear the 3 stooges theme because this company sure must have Moe, Larry and Curly running it to let something like this happen.

My business is ruined.

IS the festival over in India?

How I have interpreted in your patronizing explaination of your so called outage is this... you integrated an outsource software without fully testing. Somewhere in the language of your "Vendor" software there was a bug and knowing how corporate America works, you didn't beta test this on a separate server away from your customers before implementing. Cutting corners to save money I bet! As a result of your laziness, you have cost millions of dollars to your customers worldwide.
Shame on you for also abusing the wonderful people of India! The only reason you employ them is because you can get away with paying them low slave wages and keep more money in your pocket.

Perhaps the tech guys will be able to add the pictures for me? Yeah, and it will rain $100 bills in my back yard tonight!

I have just spoken with my powerseller rep at ebay. She can't believe how andale is handling the situation.

Whatever they are paying you, Crystal - it isn't enough. I wouldn't be in your shoes for anything this past week. I am so disgusted - just like everyone else - and of course YOU Get the heat. Thanks for at least being there for us. But I wouldn't blame you if you just walked out.
Just like all the others, I am considering "Bailing". What else can we do?

Poste four hours ago:

Great. I leave for 4 hours expecting SOMETHING to be fixed AS PROMISED and come back to find the site is DOWN AGAIN! GRRRR!!!

[Shadowcat]

Wow. That's even worse than the early days of ebay(remember all the outages during those times?).

[FLvamp]

OMG! How awful!

I can't even get my mind around how devastating this must be for a ton of people.

[FLvamp]

Wow, it's down right this minute.

The Andale website is currently under maintenance. Earlier today, we were pushing a fix that would have fixed some of the outstanding checkout and lister issues. We did not anticipate this would bring the site down, but it did. Our engineering and operations team are working on restoring services soon. We require this downtime to push fixes we've been working on. The ETA for the site to be back up is on Nov 5th, Saturday 6.30AM PST. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you.

[blissmeister]

Originally Posted by Shadowcat

Wow. That's even worse than the early days of ebay(remember all the outages during those times?).

The famous "our site is down due to non-funtionality". I think there was more talk about the word itself than their site actually being NON-functional.

At least I know now why the andale counters are very far and few between.

[blissmeister]

Originally Posted by FLvamp

OMG! How awful!

I can't even get my mind around how devastating this must be for a ton of people.

It has not only affected ebay listings, but andale also allows you (as a registered member) to create what I refer to as "counters anywhere", where you can grab a counter and stick it on your own site. When I initially saw this problem, I really thought andale was trying to merge its customers who were having free counters, to upgrade to the 'pro counters', of course for a fee. You don't suppose this is why they are experiencing this downtime, do you? Just curious.

[Toy Ranch]

It's about as messed up as something can get... short of just losing all data... I don't know if Andale will survive this one.

And yes, I think it sucks to be Crystal these days....

[blissmeister]

The ETA for the site to be back up is on Nov 5th, Saturday 6.30AM PST.

It would appear to me that Andale is now using the tactics of ezboard. We will insure to have this problem corrected and our servers up and running the day before yesterday.

[Toy Ranch]

Originally Posted by blissmeister

It has not only affected ebay listings, but andale also allows you (as a registered member) to create what I refer to as "counters anywhere", where you can grab a counter and stick it on your own site. When I initially saw this problem, I really thought andale was trying to merge its customers who were having free counters, to upgrade to the 'pro counters', of course for a fee. You don't suppose this is why they are experiencing this downtime, do you? Just curious.

Counters are not affected by this.

[george]

wow some emails , not to mention my email to them

Crystal.... you ruined my cash flow i got 6 call girls wanting there money and if i cant come up with 7000 to pay them well let me put it this way you may think that yall are in a bind but see here i got a guy sitting down the road from me in a cadillac that says come monday iam gonna become his "bitch" now i dont know what that mean but believe you me i wont be bending over or yawing without looking around first! get the damn thing workling!!!!!!

[foptiludrop]

Is this outage going to have serious repercussions for eBay?

On its About Us page (UK site, which is 'up' btw), Andale says:

Over the last year, Andale's sellers were responsible for approximately $3 billion in gross merchandise sales and now drive more than 75% of all listings on eBay US each week.

Is this true? Has anyone been keeping up with eBay's listings/sales stats?

http://uk.andale.com/corp/us/about.jsp

[foptiludrop]

Prashant Nedungadi
Andale Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer
Email: prashantnedungadi@andale.com

As Chief Technology Officer, Prashant is responsible for the architecture and implementation of Andale's suite of products and services. He is focused on building a service with a scalable architecture to support the company's US and international growth. Prashant's goal is to provide a fast, easy-to-use and dependable service that millions of users can use simultaneously.

http://uk.andale.com/corp/us/management.jsp

[bluekazoo]

Fop, here's the old trusty Medved tracker link ...

Medved Tracking - Auction Counts

[foptiludrop]

Thanks, Kazoo!

Doesn't look (to me) like this has affected eBay at all yet...