Beckett addresses website concerns
A letter to our members:
We would like to take this time to address the website concerns which many of you have voiced through forums, emails, or posts on Facebook and Twitter. We apologize for the performance issues that we have been experiencing of late, in particular the difficulties using Organize, and searching the Online Price Guides and Marketplace. Our online goal is, and has always been, to provide a stable platform for our members to build and manage their collections. In trying to meet the needs of so many collecting styles and so many collections, we now find that we are extending the capabilities of our system.
We are working to resolve these performance issues for you by making our system more scalable for all our future expansion needs, which allows us to offer a more pleasurable user experience to our valued collectors. While work on this has begun, we do want to mention that it will take some time to complete as we do not want to resort to a quick fix which will be ineffective in a few months. Here is a list of items we are planning:
1) The first is to ensure our database can handle the large number of data queries that our customers demand each day. This will include rebuilding the structure of Organize in the database. Because of the complicated nature of Organize, we have estimated it will take 3 weeks to rebuild before it is handed over to our testing teams for evaluation.
2) In the near short term, we will try to make some changes which we think will have a positive impact on website performance:
a) Emptying the Trash Folders. If items are in a Trash folder, we are considering these items as trash and not part of anyone’s collections; and therefore something that can be removed. There are millions of items in the Trash folders which contribute to the performance issues. We know that some of you have had difficulty using the Empty Trash button, so we will be removing ALL Trash items from the Trash folders. This will be a one-time occurrence. We will also adjust the functionality of the Empty Trash button for those who may move a large amount of items into Trash in the future. If you have over 100,000 items in Trash and use the Empty Trash button, a notice will appear stating that the Trash will empty the next day. This is a temporary step until everything is resolved.
b) Calculating Collection Values. We will adjust the functionality of the Calculate button for those of you with extremely large collections. Whenever the Calculate button is used, there is a tremendous load on the database which slows things down for everyone. If you have over 100,000 items in a collection and use the Calculate button, a notice will appear stating that the Total Collection Value and/or Total Beckett Value will be available the next day. Upon returning to Organize at that later time, the calculated values will appear. This is a temporary calculation process until everything is resolved. Total Access subscribers will still be able to calculate the value of their collections, regardless of size, without any delay.
3) As a final step, we will rebuild the search engine indexing, including the addition of new hardware. This will greatly improve the performance of Organize, Online Price Guides, Trade, Marketplace, and all pages of beckett.com. We will keep you posted on the progress of this step as it will be initiated after we have completed Step 1 (as described above).
Our number one priority still remains offering you the best user experience, one that greatly surpasses the site stability we experienced in 2012 and early this year. We will focus all our energy on making the website an even more enjoyable place for you to collect. We have so many great ideas and ways for you to utilize the information Beckett has been maintaining for over 25 years, and we want to provide our members with the best website in which to do it.
We appreciate your business and thank you being a valued member of beckett.com!
Sincerely,
Bill Sutherland
Chief Hobby Operations Officer
The Marketplace could be so great but is definitely lacking. It used to be easier to search and find new items whether or not that card was a new one or an old one. I think if we can search ebay for new items easily, the same should be said of the Marketplace.
Bill,
THANKS for yours and everyone else efforts in continually improving the site. One thing that I’d liek to see if POSSIBLE would be for the Price column to be able to be sorted from A-Z / Z-A. Sometimes you just wanna look at ALL your $5.00 cards without having to search through your entire collection.
THANKS ALL!!!!!
JP
I paid for an online subscription/organize for one month and was extremely disappointed.
Overall pretty good experience for me really, now there are those days when I am trying to add 500 cards and the site is down and that just makes my eye balls explode. However it was fixed in a day or two. Only thing I see is the speed issue and I know its because of such a huge mass of information for the cpu to run through but I still think it could be tweeked. I also understand market analysis needs to be done for a 2 week period at a minimum for pricing of a new product but I have seen it take way longer than two weeks for some to be posted. Then you also have some products where half of the cards are priced and the other half take a couple days, just wait to release and post the pricing until they are all analyzed. All in all Beckett would get a B from me and potentially could be an A+ within the next year. So great job Chris and Suze and Mr Sutherland thanks for listening to us Beckett heads.
That’s all fine and dandy and definitely appreciated. BUT, where are all of the features we constantly have asked for (and were promised) for 5+ years such as online hot lists for each sport and up and down arrows for pricing in our organize? And shouldn’t you fix the pricing in our organize first? All of a sudden mint pricing on all cards have a 25% increase one day, years ago mind you, and it never gets fixed. I’m tired of having to calculate values of my cards when I pay you guys to do it. This organize pricing problem also gives every one of us inaccurate total values in our collections. Yeah, the total collection value will work in seconds, but it still won’t be correct so what good is that?
A nice to have would definitely be being able to add set header lines to organize. I can never really get the value of my collection from your website because I cannot add set values. Adding all individual cards and their values from a set to organize not only clutters the organize section, but it overvalues that particular set. I’ve always thought that it was a HUGE miss on the website that you can manage the values of your individual cards but not the value of your sets.
What a joke. I see these messages from Beckett every 3-4 months.
#1 Hot & Cold lists
#2 up & down arrows for your so called “Organize”
Lets start with that.
Why don’t you take all inactive accounts and their orgs out of the system and store them somewhere else. This would be very helpful, especially in the CtoC function. There are inactive collectors there that are clogging up the system, i.e., listing ALL baseball for their wants. And when you click on their name you find that they haven’t been around for years. Very frustrating.
As Jason S said about sorting the price column, that would be fantastic. I know that we used to be able to do that, but the function has been taken off. It sure would be nice again to have that option. Not to mention, it would free up some activity on the site because people would get on there and get off instead of searching through their collection looking for things in terms of price.
The PROCEED TO PAYMENT button is not working for me and I can’t find any help. Your phone number does not ring. I requested you to call me but nobody does. I have sent emails but nobody responds. Highly frustrated because I have worked three solid days to get an order in your system and can’t get it finished. I have ordered from you for many years and have never had problems. Please help.
Hi Stephen,
Sorry to hear this. I don’t have access to any customer info or stuff on that side as it’s only editorial here. However, I have reached out directly to someone in customer service to contact you.