UPDATE: A spokesman from Zalora Taiwan said:

Zalora Taiwan is conducting review of our operating model in Taiwan to shift some of the operation to our headquarter in Singapore. During the period, we would not be able to serve new order and we apologize for the inconvenience caused. We will resume the operation as soon as possible and keep you informed.

Any returns and refund will also be honored according to the term agreed. All customers can contact us on cs@zalora.com.tw. Our customer service agent will response within 1 working day.

We deny any rumors that we are going through a bankruptcy or closure. All payment to customers and our vendors are proceeded or will be preceded. All of our employees will be managed according with Taiwan labor law. We reserve the right to take legal action against anyone making untrue statement about us.

One year after launching in Taiwan, Rocket Internet-backed Zalora may be shutting down its operations in the country. Though the Singapore-based fashion e-tailer has yet to issue a confirmation, e27 notes several signs that a closure of its Taiwan branch is already in progress.

Zalora Taiwan’s Web site currently says that it will no longer provide telephone services for customer support after today. Furthermore, Taiwanese TV news station TVBS reported last week (link via Google Translate) that more than 100 employees were suddenly laid off as Zalora canceled orders from suppliers. Reasons cited by TVBS for Zalora Taiwan’s potential demise include the high cost of marketing in Taiwan’s saturated online retail market, which is already dominated by e-commerce sites Yahoo! Taiwan and PChome.

Zalora recently landed several high-profile investments, including $26 million from German retail conglomerate Tengelmann Group, but as Jacky Yap of e27 notes, Rocket Internet has already encountered several setbacks in Southeast Asia, including the closure of Home24. “Rocket Internet will not hesitate to pull the plug when it comes to evaluating a likely failure,” just as it shut down its operations in Turkey last August, Yap writes.

Despite Zalora’s rapid growth, the reported closure of its Taiwan operations is a reminder that Rocket Internet’s foothold on the Asian market is still not a sure thing. I’ve reached out to Zalora’s HQ for comment and will update if I hear back from them.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While the media continues to debate the severity of the denial-of-service attacks taking place across the web this month, they appear to have claimed another victim: payments startup Dwolla announced today that it, too, is now experiencing a distributed denial-of-service event (DDoS attack). The attack, which is still underway, began yesterday, resulting in either limited or no availability to the company’s website, Dwolla.com.

In a brief message posted to Dwolla’s blog, the company says that the event is still ongoing, and is preventing people from viewing the site and accessing Dwolla’s service. Also affected are third-party developers, who are using the company’s APIs to integrate Dwolla’s payment technologies into their own sites and services.

These developers were notified today, and Dwolla says that it’s working with service providers to resolve the issue.

Responding in the comments section of the post, the company told concerned users and developers that the consumer-facing API is unavailable at present, but as far as the company knows right now, actual fraud is not involved – that is, there’s no risk to users’ money, nor will this have affected transactions that took place before the attacks began.

“Funds are fine, and we do have our fraud team actively monitoring the entire situation,” wrote a Dwolla company representative, addressing a commenter’s complaint.

The company says that the attack is actually affecting its hosting provider, and they’re unsure at this time if it’s related to the SpamHaus situation.

One of the service providers that Dwolla is working with is CloudFlare, the Internet security firm that’s stepped in to protect a number of companies in the wake of these recent attacks. (You can see a CloudFlare message appear upon visiting the Dwolla.com domain at present).

The New York Times quoted CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince this week, who equated the DDoS attacks to the Internet’s version of a “nuclear bomb.” Gizmodo later followed up on this report and another from the BBC, downplaying the scale of the attacks – they’re not affecting the entire Internet, Gizmodo claims.

Full text of the Dwolla.com blog post below, in case you’re unable to pull it up yourself (or choose not to, out of kindness):

Dwolla.com updates 

Yesterday afternoon, Dwolla’s service providers became the victim of a distributed denial of service event, resulting in limited or no availability to the website, Dwolla.com.

This advanced event, still persists today, and is preventing people from viewing the website and consequently accessing its services. We apologize for this inconvenience and are working hard with our service providers to resolve the issue.

In the meantime, we will continue to update this post with more details.

(UPDATE 1:50pm CT: Third-party developers have been formally notified of the service interruption. Our team continues to work closely with service providers.)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Digg.com and other links from its website have disappeared from Google’s search result pages, following a recent update to Google’s algorithms. It’s unclear at this time exactly what caused the site to be de-listed, though the current speculation is that it has to do with Digg pointing to bad or spammy links. [UPDATE: See below, Google says it will fix the problem].

You can see the issue right now if you Google the keyword “digg” – the site is no longer the top search result. Instead the top results are the Digg Wikipedia page, its Twitter account, and other links that are highly ranked for the word “digg.”

In addition, if you Google “site:digg.com,” Google will display a message saying no results are found.

Some conspiracy theorists out there are even pointing out that the de-listing came shortly after Digg’s announcement that it would build a replacement to Google Reader, but that’s more than a bit crazy. For Google to drop the site from its index, it would have to be a technical error of some sort, or something to do with the links Digg is hosting.

As one person on Hacker News points out:

Doing a site:digg.com/news/ search on Bing shows a lot of pages like these: http://digg.com/news/gaming/ing_bank_i_ilanlar and even more duplicate tag and rss pages for “site:digg.com/tag/” and “site:digg.com rss”.

These /news/ pages 302 redirect to many different sites (some are bound to contain spam or be of lower quality).

302 redirects for these links is bad practice. Some link shorteners (ab)use 302 Found (instead of 301 Moved Permanently) to hoard content that doesn’t belong to them. The content for these links can’t be found on digg.com, so they too use the wrong redirect and associate themselves with all pages they link to.

Besides that: Digg.com acts like a single page webapp for most of its content. There are no discussion pages or detail pages for the stories. The content that does appear is near duplicate to other content on the web, especially with popular stories, where many blogs just copy the title and the first intro paragraph.

Another user on Hacker News noted that Digg’s robots.txt file now reads: User-agent: * Disallow, which would imply an issue on Digg’s part, not Google’s.

However, Digg GM Jake Levine tells us that he suspects the issue might have to do with the links the Digg is hosting from the old Digg.

“We’re chatting with Google to work this out, but my guess is that it has something to do with the links we’re hosting from the old Digg. When we acquired Digg we inherited tens of thousands of links to old Digg submissions, some of which ranked well in search,” Levine explains. “We decided the right thing to do was to redirect all of those links to the original source URLs. This may have tripped up Google’s index. I’m sure we’ll be able to get this sorted out shortly.”

“The good news is that it doesn’t really impact us all that much,” he adds. “The vast majority of our traffic is direct (like 90%+) so it’s not a huge deal for us from a business/user perspective.”

Digg is still waiting for Google to respond at this point, so we’ll know more soon.

Despite Levine’s assurance that most of Digg’s traffic is direct, and the Google de-listing won’t affect the site, I’ve seen first-hand the effects of a change like this can do when a big-name site is involved. Several years ago, when I worked at ReadWriteWeb (now ReadWrite), an article on the site became the top hit for Facebook in Google. Since many people don’t actually type a URL (they just Google a site name), thousands of confused users fled to the comments complaining they couldn’t log in and what has happened to Facebook!? Years later, we’re still getting a good laugh about this.

UPDATE: Google has provided an official response:

We’re sorry about the inconvenience this morning to people trying to search for Digg. In the process of removing a spammy link on Digg.com, we inadvertently applied the webspam action to the whole site. We’re correcting this, and the fix should be deployed shortly.

UPDATE, 2:20 PM ET: Digg has now returned.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Freetards rejoice. Spotify has ditched the 5 play limit imposed on UK users of the free version of its music streaming service, Spotify Free, which until today kicked in after six months usage and meant that no one track could be streamed more than 5 times — it would become greyed out after the limit had been reached.

Removing the cap, which was introduced in April 2011 (along with a number of other changes to its free offering), brings it in line with other European markets where Spotify began ditching the 5 play limit in March, notes Music Ally.

The U.S., Australia, and New Zealand have never had a cap, while in Europe, France seems to be the hold out. What hasn’t changed, however, is the 10 hours of streaming per month limit associated with the Spotify Free tariff, as the company continues to nudge users towards becoming paying customers.

Here’s what Spotify has to say on its blog:

We’ve got some mighty fine news for all Spotify Free users. From today, there’s no more 5 play-per-song limit. You can listen to your favourite songs as many times as you like.

That’s right, no more greyed-out songs. The tracks that you couldn’t listen to before will once again be available for your listening pleasure.

Give it a try.

As I noted when Spotify first introduced the 5 play limit, along with a cap on the number of listening hours overall for its non-paying customers, the idea of drawing a line in the sand between paying users and non-paying users made sense within the context of Spotify’s freemium model. And for many, the inconvenience of ads, however repetitive they are, wasn’t enough of a reason to upgrade to a paid account. Introducing false scarcity was always going to be more effective. In that context, capping free usage to ten hours per-month was an easy message to convey, while the 5 play limit seems idiosyncratic to say the least and, as I speculated at the time, probably came at the request of the major record labels who Spotify remains entirely reliant upon.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Spotify’s new terms for non-paying users, however, is that after 6 months they’ll only be able to play each track up to a total of 5 times. This, of course, produces artificial scarcity and therefore it could be argued that it will push more users to pay for a subscription. But it also feels arbitrary. Why five plays? Is the sixth play more expensive to serve than the previous five?

More broadly, however, despite today’s small change to Spotify Free, it appears to remain the case that a free, ad-supported music streaming service without any limits remains nonviable. The economics simply don’t work, however hard you try to crowbar in a freemium model.

Meanwhile, despite reports of its imminent world-wide launch, no word yet on when Spotify plans to bring its U.S.-only free mobile Internet radio feature to its mobile apps in the UK (or elsewhere outside the U.S.). Rightly or wrongly, the Internet radio model, which imposes arcane rules such as how many tracks by the same artist can be played sequentially etc., has a different royalty rate to a pure “on-demand” offering.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Marissa Mayer has succeeded. In getting people to have an opinion about Yahoo again. While many are skewering Mayer for not being progressive with her work-from-home “ban,” people who are more familiar with what exactly is going on are quietly singing her praises.

Mayer will be putting the official smackdown on remote workers come June. People with a work-from-home agreement will have to report to a local office in the region by then, or else. People who have an agreement to work one or two days from home are strongly encouraged to spend those days in the office — a more subtle “ban” that will affect their performance ratings.

“I have been at Yahoo for four years and let’s just say the house needed and still needs a lot of cleaning up. Marissa is doing just that,” wrote an anonymous Yahoo employee on Quora. “People will use the argument that look at Google and how it allows employees to work from home … We are fighting to stay relevant. So getting your ass into the office and working on projects is not too much to ask.”

A non-tragic ending for Yahoo may justify Mayer’s means. As Chris Dixon and others point out, discouraging working from home at Yahoo and discouraging workers from working from home at other, more on-track tech companies like Google are two different things.

There was and is rampant abuse of the Yahoo work-from-home policy — it was a joke. “Working at [Yahoo] HQ was like paying taxes in Greece,” said Twitter’s Patrick Ewing, who also had friends who cheated the system. The fact that the Yahoo parking lot is relatively empty (compared to, oh, Facebook’s) at 5pm is why you can’t have nice things.

We also spoke to a couple of former and current employees, and while some are sniping at the inconvenience, the move was clearly necessary. According to one source, Mayer explained the rationale at Yahoo’s “Friday FYI,” its equivalent of Google’s TGIF. ”We’ve checked and some people who work from home haven’t even logged into the VPN…” she apparently said.

First world problems: Your boss requires that you actually show up at work.—
Fake Alexia (@alexia_tsotsis) February 26, 2013

So it’s not that Mayer doesn’t get all the studies on workplace productivity, mobile workforce, etc. It’s not that she doesn’t get that going into the office can be a major distraction. She does. It’s not that there aren’t legitimately productive work-from-homers, like the new mom who spends all day at the computer but needs to check in on her kid from time to time. It’s that the bunch of slackers that claimed to be working from home without actually doing any work ruined it for everyone.

In the last four years, Yahoo has gone through five CEOs — An easy environment for people to hide and get lost under the rug. People get away with not working on a single project. And managers are just as guilty as their employees of cheating the system: One VP was given a 100% retention bonus after Scott Thompson laid off everyone… And ended up playing tennis and going to the gym most of the time.

“They simply hired the wrong people over the years and had no metrics to track performance/etc,” one former employee told me. There’s been some internal speculation that the ban will allow the company to lay employees off without paying severance packages, or just get more people to quit in general. “This really is a necessary part of cutting out the cancer that is Yahoo’s current performance,” the same person emphasized. “And while it’s a horrible mess, it’s sadly necessary.”

Image via Ashley Mayer and @mm

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

GoDaddy’s email service experienced an extended outage this morning, affecting a portion of its customer base. The outage took down the email systems beginning around 7:00 AM ET (estimated) this morning, and the problems were fixed by 10:30 AM ET, according to the company.

We received numerous tips from readers about the problem, and Twitter was also filled with complaints. Though outages do happen from time to time with online services, GoDaddy had barely recovered from the bad PR surrounding the lengthy outage in September, which prompted the hosting company to offer customers a free month of hosting for their troubles. At the time, a member of online activist group Anonymous, acting independently from the collective, had originally claimed responsibility for taking the GoDaddy sites down. However, the company claimed it was due to internal errors on their end involving corrupted DNS tables. During that outage, GoDaddy’s email was affected too, as many on Twitter have also noted today.

GoDaddy says today’s issue affected “some” users, but has not yet clarified with us how many users specifically or what caused the problem. The communications team is working to get answers now, we’re told. We’ve given the company over an hour to respond to our questions, so at this point, we’ll just have to update this post when they get back to us.

In addition, the GoDaddy System Alerts page has been updated with a brief message regarding today’s outage:

For approximately three hours, customers were unable to log in to Web-Based Email and the Hosting Control Panel. Your email should be operating normally now, and no messages were lost during the disruption. Service has been fully restored and we are investigating the issue. We apologize for the inconvenience

Below, a selection representative of today’s tweets:

#Godaddy email is down again. Third time in as many months that I know of. Consider them cautiously.

—
Jim Ross, HD Pro (@JimRossInFocus) October 19, 2012

@GoDaddy I signed up w #godaddy a few months ago. you guys are averaging ISSUES about once every month and a half now?!?!?!

—
James Jackson (@jcjackson3) October 19, 2012

Is @godaddy's email down again? Ugh. Their worse than an abusive relationship!

—

Canadian wireless and internet provider Rogers is currently experiencing a widespread, continued outage of services on both its cellular and cable home internet data networks, according to various user reports. Rogers is the second-largest internet provider in Canada by subscriber count, and the largest cellphone provider with somewhere around 10 million mobile customers.

Reports of outages are coming in on Twitter from a variety of cities in Southern Ontario, including Toronto, Waterloo and London, and some even suggest that the outage may spread across the entire country. Little is known about the potential cause, but some reports suggest that the Rogers Internet DNS is the culprit, as per this tweet:

RT @isaacaurele: appears that #Rogers #Internet #DNS Rogers Internet DNS is down. You can switch to google DNS (8.8.8.8) and it works fine.

— Mario Bourque (@mariobourque) September 29, 2012

Attempts to call Rogers support are met with a system that’s clearly not holding up well under a high influx of user reports. The system doesn’t even appear to be able to route calls properly, and customers are instead left scratching their heads. For now, there are millions of customers likely in the dark and without internet unless they also get mobile or other service from one of Canada’s other major providers who maintain their own networks.

I’ve reached out to the company to find out more, and will update as additional information becomes available. Here are some of the tweets from affected customers describing the situation:

#Rogers Internet is down. Been on hold for over an hour now. #Mississauga twitter.com/hsandhar/statu…

— Harjot Sandhar (@hsandhar) September 29, 2012

#Rogers Internet down in southern Ontario & ? nationwide. EVERYONE call them this week & and demand 1 day credit. Watch how fast they learn!

— Dr Fever (|||+) (@TheRealDrFever) September 29, 2012

In addition to Rogers customers, Dan Levy on Twitter notes that those using either Fido or Chatr (both Rogers subsidiaries) are also affected by the outage.

Update: Rogers has issued the following statement via Twitter. I’ve been in touch with a representative of the company who said they’d try to provide some additional information, but have yet to hear back:

Our apologies – some customers are experiencing wireline interruptions. We are working to resolve and will provide updates.

— RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) September 29, 2012

Update #2: A few more tweets, including the first I could find of any problems, putting the estimated length of service issues at over two hours now:

I swear everyone with Rogers Internet went down for a good 5 mins

— Ahmed™ (@Ahmed_Slick) September 29, 2012

Report from the East Coast, meaning Ontario definitely isn’t the only market affected:

#rogers Internet is down in #moncton and from what I read, across the country. #thissucks #timeforFibreOp #bellswitchinmyfuture

— Steve Peraud  (@GermanFrog) September 30, 2012

And one joke at Rogers expense:

0% of Rogers Internet customers can read this right now

— Stats Canada (@stats_canada) September 30, 2012

Update #3: Some customers, including in Barrie and Ottawa, report having no problems with service. Still, the vast majority of reports I’m seeing say just the opposite: connectivity is eithes very slow or non-existent:

@techcrunch @drizzled Up for me in Ottawa, both Cable and LTE/4G @rogershelps twitter.com/SeansPics/stat…

— Sean Leslie (@SeansPics) September 30, 2012

Update #4: Reports are starting to come in that service seems to have been restored. I’m also seeing speeds that seem to be back to normal, on both LTE and cable:

@drizzled my nets back

— meeeeeelosh (@omyGOSHmilosh) September 30, 2012

Rogers internet has been down. Only starting to see better results now.

— JRDN LRNZO | NU-LITE (@JRDNLRNZO) September 30, 2012

So annoyed by Rogers. Home phone+wifi have been down for 2 hours and just came back.

— Directioner5Ever (@VanillePlahaha) September 30, 2012

Update #5: Despite improved performance for some, others are clearly still facing problems, and Rogers has been silent since its last tweet over an hour and a half ago:

Well, Rogers seems to be down. Then up. Then down again. Then up again. And then down again…the pattern goes on.

— Gio Victorio (@GioVictorio) September 30, 2012

#rogers is still down, going on 5 hours now!!

— Trevor Hunsberger (@TWHunsberger) September 30, 2012

Update #6: Rogers now says that the issue affecting customers has been resolved, let us know if that fits with your experience:

Internet issues some wireline / wireless customers were experiencing should nowbe resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience.

— RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) September 30, 2012

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Silicon Valley, residents of California, and citizens in 11 other states can now register to vote online. California, the newest state to ease the inconvenience of voter registration, launched their online portal today. “Today, the Internet replaces the mailbox for thousands of Californians wishing to register to vote,” California Secretary of State Debra Bowen said. “Today we are taking the next step in the never-ending evolution of democracy and reaching every Californian.”

Voters have been able to register online for years but had to complete the process with a partially filled-out registration form that was mailed to users. Unfortunately, studies have shown that netizens didn’t take the extra step and such hybrid online-offline efforts could actually decrease voter registration.

Among the more innovative uses of online voter registration was developed by the state of Washington. Voters there can register through Facebook with an app that populates the regular online form with data gleaned from a user’s Facebook account. Another effort, Ourtime, a voter initiative organization, has teamed up with websites, such as Lady Gaga’s, Yahoo, and (Aol-owned) The Huffington Post, to embed links to voter registration for citizens of states permitting online registration.

California, Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Nevada, Maryland, and New York allow online registering, and Connecticut, Delaware, and Hawaii are on the path, according to Jarrett Moreno of Ourtime.

So Silicon Valley nerds, if you haven’t registered to vote, what are you waiting for? I just registered online, and, I gotta tell ya, it feels better than being massaged by angels at Disneyland. Go to the California Secretary of States website and register now.

[Image Credit: Flickr User erin leigh mcconnell]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Dropbox appears to be having significant issues as users have experienced slow speeds and/or inability to access their files for at least 9 hours. Some users claim the site has been slow since Monday morning.

This morning, Dropbox co-founder and CTO Arash Ferdowsi posted in the Dropbox forum,

“hi all,

we’re experiencing heavy load which is resulting in intermittent slowness/downtime. in some cases there’ll be a delay when syncing files through the desktop client but the delay shouldn’t last more than a minute or two. we had a similar issue yesterday and the team is hard at work on a solution.

we’re very sorry for the inconvenience and will provide updates as we learn more”

The team also tweeted about the issue:

hi all, we’re having intermittent downtime and working hard on fixing things up. sorry for the inconvenience forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=6…

— Dropbox (@DropboxOps) August 21, 2012

Users have been posting in significant numbers about the issues they’ve been seeing, some saying they cannot access their accounts at all and countering Dropbox’s time frames:

“the delay shouldn’t last more than a minute or two” um, no. The delays have been much much longer than a minute or two, 10-15min to upload a single 0k text file. I currently have 2 tiny files that have been “stuck” for well over 30 minutes. –member Clint W.

I can understand network problems, everybody faces it someday, and work hard to solve it. What I can NOT understand is lack of communication. I checked your twitter users @dropbox and @dropboxops, and thought the problem was on my side. I lost many hours checking configurations. Then I remembered the forum and came here for help. Big surprise, was not my problem, but everybody’s problem. One tweet when the problem begun, and I could had spent those hours playing with my son. Come on, guys, we know you could have problems, but TELL US quickly! I’m a paying customer who now wonders if should set a Google Drive account as a contingency. We both lose. –pro user Alex P.

Seriously guys, you can’t expect everything to always be working even if you paid for it. Its not like Dropbox is down for a week, so take it easy. They are human and they are doing there best to bring everything back up. –pro user Faisal A.

Being in the business I can tell you this is no small glich. You dont go into the storage business let alone a cloud storage business without a serious architecture. Massive redundancy across the board; storage, circuits, etc. No one should try to down play and state “You cant expect is to work all the time” thats just B.S. with the amount of redundance involved and DR that should be tested on a on going bases…–member u70143446

Users have seen different responses from Dropbox about the issue:

Two different explanations from Dropbox. The one Andy posted saying the desktop clients are being throttled due to maintenance, and the one I got 23 minutes before that saying they are looking into the cause of the problem:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Teams Support
Date: Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 12:33 PM PDT
Subject: RE: Dropbox for Teams Syncing is Slow

Hi Kip,

We are seeing some slowness across our network at the moment. Our engineers are looking in to the cause of the issue but it sounds like they will get ti resolved this afternoon.

Sorry for the delays in your syncs. –member Kip

And this response:

I’ve reached out to Dropbox for comment and I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks to the tipster who pointed out that we cover Twitter and similar outages within minutes, but were very slow to this one. You’re right. But better late than never, which I’m guessing is the Dropbox motto right now.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“I wouldn’t touch you with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole.”

There’s a bit of inherent risk when shopping online. You’re handing over your credit card to a retailer that promises to ship you something in return. Most of the time transactions are completed without issue and orders are fulfilled as promised. Sometimes things go awry, though. And sometimes Best Buy ruins Christmas.

Best Buy started reaching out to customers earlier this week — you know, mere days before Christmas — that the retailer was unable to fulfill orders placed as far back as November. Big Blue was sorry but they were canceling the affected orders. Happy holidays! Signed, your merry friends at Best Buy!

Consumers traded the safety of buying an object from a brick and mortar store for the convenience and often lower prices found online. As Best Buy proves here, buying items online is still a bit risky even in 2011. Consumers just do not know for a 100% fact that they will get their product. Sure, receipts are issued and shipping estimates are given, but there are just too many variables involved for complete trust. Shipping companies can also break the chain, too. You just never know if the FedEx man is going to chuck your LCD monitor over a gate.

Generally though, the bigger the retailer, the more safe the transaction feels. Amazon, Walmart, Newegg and, to a lesser extent now, Best Buy should be considered trusted retailers. These massive companies should be able to fulfill online orders with minimum exceptions. But issues do arise. Customers are sometimes left without their order, feeling used and abused.

Don’t worry about Best Buy, though. The retailer isn’t hurting its bottom line by canceling orders en mass. The Wall Street Journal quotes an analyst stating “It’s a hiccup for the company” and “It probably won’t make a big difference for Best Buy’s holiday sales.” Oh good. Because Best Buy’s earnings were the first things I thought of when this story broke. Screw the customers. They don’t matter anyway.

Apparently if those with canceled orders whine enough, Best Buy will issue them a gift card for the inconvenience. Of course those that suck it up and move on get nothing.

There’s no way of knowing how many of these canceled orders were to be holiday presents. Reportedly many of the canceled items were sold on Black Friday. But even without Christmas looming, Best Buy held these orders hostage for nearly a month. They violated the trust of their customers. The retailer essentially cast a wide net, collecting just as many orders as they could, likely knowing it would be unable to fulfill them all. It’s greedy, unacceptable and just plain wrong. Merry Christmas.

Oh, and just in case you need help, the CEO of Best Buy posted a tip to his Facebook page.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch