New Beckett President Addresses Website Performance Issues, Future Plans
Dear Beckett User,
Please allow me to introduce myself – I am Brian Gulledge, the new President of Beckett Media LLC. I have recently joined the company with a primary focus of correcting, improving and growing our online presence.
Over the last few weeks, several customer emails and phone calls have been forwarded to me regarding our current website and some of the quality issues we experience. Rather than playing the politically correct game to explain what we are doing to improve the situation, or giving the standard “Thank you, we are working on it,” I feel that being frank and upfront with you, the Beckett community, is much more appropriate.
For the most part, the site is poorly architected without the code and technical infrastructure to handle the scale of users that want to access our data. Part of this is a good problem to have, as the data is of great value to collectors, dealers and traders, and more and more customers have joined over the last few months. From the feedback you have given us, our data is top notch and second to none. It is the access to and speed of acquiring that data that accentuates many of the experienced issues. This frustrates all of us.
Not to bore you with too many details, but the current data set is massive (226 million products and billions of lines of content), and with the existing programming architecture and structure, the current website is not something we can easily correct for stability or scale.
Our solution is to build a new website while doing our best to stabilize and improve performance of the existing site. It is the only way we see to create a more user-friendly and speedy environment to meet the needs of our growing customer base. The new team that has been assembled on this project is world class. Many of the websites this team has created and worked on are among the top 100 largest traffic sites in the world.
Our expected timeline to launch the new website is the end of the December. Why so long? Because we are committed to launching a clean customer centric site that can deal with the increasing traffic, speed and data demands while being careful to retain your user information, collection interactions and community relationships that make our product so unique.
In the short term, we will continue to work diligently on solving existing speed and time-out errors. Please be patient with us. We have heard you loudly and clearly, and that is why this talented new team is in place.
Most Sincerely,
Brian D. Gulledge
President
[…] and that is why this talented new team is in place. Most Sincerely, Brian D. Gulledge President New Beckett President Addresses Website Performance Issues, Future Plans The Beckett Blog __________________ Shop for Sports Cards and Trading […]
Thank you very much for addressing the problem personally. I’m glad Beckett is working on this to get it corrected.
Thanks Mr. Gulledge for your honest and upfront evaluation. Beckett is an incredibly useful tool to us collectors. I will look forward to improvements.
Sweet!
Sound like this is the right direction to go.
I have one word for you…
Cloud Computing.
But you probably already knew that…
Cheers!
Giant step in the right direction. You got your work cut out for you!
Good to hear. I love Beckett.
This is great news. Keep us up to date on the progress.
Thanks for admitting the site as it is right now is crap. I’m looking forward to see how the next one will be!
@ Cranky Money: That is 2 words. Oh, I only kid!
Anywho, this is awesome news. I am not really looking forward to “another” site, as the change drove a lot of people away the first time, but obviously if this can be done smoothly and efficiently (as it seems is the plan), this could totally be a step in the RIGHT direction this time. I applaud Beckett for all their efforts with this site. It did have its upsides as well as its downsides and for the most part they did well at battling through. But it looks like it was doomed from the get go which might be why it never really got going.
Thank you for your up front message. It is very refreshing to hear an acknowledgement of the problems as opposed to excuses like many other companies have gotten too good at making. Dealing with the site over the past few months has been a very trying experience to say the least. I look forward to December…
I feel better about the site by reading this, but I want to know if we OPG subscribers will be compensated for our lost OPG usage time. The last time the site worked so terribly I was given an extra 2 weeks or so on my OPG. I am a ‘Total Access’ subscriber now (last time I only subscribed to 1 sport at a time) and it would mean alot to me to be compensated for the lost time with added time to my OPG.
Brian,
Thank you for working on a solution to months of service issues with the Beckett website. I have subscribed to 3 of your online price guides each month for several years. I have logged on hundreds of times only to get the message that the site cannot be accessed. Beckett should have “fessed up” sooner and, as a way of thanking frustrated customers, sent out printed price guides for free to those of us who have spent hundreds of dollars with your company. You already had our money, but we had no prices. That suggestion for professional customer service, made several times, never even solicited one response from Beckett. My business of selling cards has been hindered by Beckett every time we could not access prices.
I wish you the best of luck in solving the website issues.
Today was especially infuriating.
All I’m trying to do is add in my A&G cards so that I can TRADE THEM.
Arggh.
Glad to hear you are working on improvements but if the site performs as poorly as it has the past few weeks you should credit your customers back a month of their fees they are paying for the sdervoce.
Im glad to hear this as I almost enlisted for the OPG but after I played around a bit on the site and saw how slow it was…I decided not to sign up for it…Glad I didn’t waste my money. I will come back in December and see what they have to offer and go from there.
Nice to hear that something is going to be done about this, I subscribe to the baseball section because I have a very large collection of cards. The constant waiting and watching the “Loading please wait” sign has been going on for over two years for me now. I have too many hours invested in my inventory to come back down the road when all is fixed and running well, yet I keep paying for a service that, by your own admission is not working well. Perhaps for us users that have no choice to return later, we can be granted a discount or several months grace without charge, as a way of saying thank you for hanging in there.
I am glad this is being worked on because I am also very tired of seeing the “please wait loading” page when in “my organize”. I must have pushed the refresh tab at least 100,000 times in the last couple of months just to try and get a page to load. Us customers have paid alot of money for a working site and we haven’t got that. I enjoy the site when it is running correctly but that is only 40-50 percent of the time. Beckett should not advertise that the you can look up listings 24/7 because we all know that is not the case. Switching to a new site would be frustrating but if it works the way a paid website should, I will be happy to move. I just hope it doesn’t erase “my organize” because I have invested many many hours into that. I hope that once the new website it up they can transfer that data. Thank you Beckett for addressing the issue I hope that you continue to work on the current site.
How about we fix the opg by putting the cards in that are not listed. Hire an intern or someone to enter cards that we the customer can prove exist and fix the ones that do not exist.
Also how about separating the diecast from the card section again.I hate trying to print a card list and getting the diecast also
Its about time someone got honest with their customers.I spend my hard earned money for a “NON”service,its most frustrating.Not to mention the rip-off factor.Apartial refund or adjustment would be in line with good customer relations to thoses of us that stuck by and continued to use your site.Thanks for the HONESTY,how refreshing!Hope it all works tomthe better,if not BYE-BYE.
You guys have a lot of work to do! However, you seem like a real ‘rollup your sleeves type of guy” …I think December is a bit of a reach….just get it right even if it goes into early next year. You guys have one shot at this! Hope it works!!! Thanks!!
Will the new site incorporate our collections all ready or do we have to put them in again? I think we all need to be informed of how your intend to do this.
Fantastic, I can’t wait to see what’s in store for the end of December. Make sure you include a way to reverse negative feedback if things are worked out between people. Cheers
I second all of this: I am glad this is being worked on because I am also very tired of seeing the “please wait loading” page when in “my organize”. I must have pushed the refresh tab at least 100,000 times in the last couple of months just to try and get a page to load. Us customers have paid alot of money for a working site and we haven’t got that. I enjoy the site when it is running correctly but that is only 40-50 percent of the time. Beckett should not advertise that the you can look up listings 24/7 because we all know that is not the case. Switching to a new site would be frustrating but if it works the way a paid website should, I will be happy to move. I just hope it doesn’t erase “my organize” because I have invested many many hours into that. I hope that once the new website it up they can transfer that data. Thank you Beckett for addressing the issue I hope that you continue to work on the current site.
Mr. Gulledge. There have been many days since this blog was posted that the site was not working. I had e-mailed Customer Service with the error codes and queries, but to no avail. I have not received contact from anyone, and I have also been lied to in the past. I was told that I was to receive a free week’s worth of the Online Price Guide, but this did not happen. I had also had my Online Price Guide subscription renewed without my permission. I had selected not to auto-renew, but the site renewed my subscription anyways. The way that your Customer Service ignores the paying customers is atrocious, and being lied to is an inexcusable act! Please rectify this!
Randi Yeates
For all the promises being made, I see absolutely no change whatsoever and a lot of angry customers.
Well December is almost over as is my patience with the OPG…3 years + paying for it and pretty much the last year has been nothing but headaches. If I see that “Page cannot be displayed we were unable to procees your request” one more time I am gonna puke. I guess I better not try the thing untill the new year then or my guts are gonna get sore.
Glad I have the money to throw away…wouldn’t want to buy a Beckett magazine with it (insert rolling eyes here______)
Hopefully you guys get your act together and I can again enjoy checking out the site which once upon a time I did.
I read the info above and Brian says by December the site should be good to go. Well, as of 1-1-2011 at 9:01 am here in Phoenix AZ, it is not working very well. I can not get to my on line cards. The site is telling me that it is working?, for 35 minutes?!?!?!? Also, I was told to make my cards public and other people would be able to see them, WELL, this is not working either, so when will this site be working the right way???????
A couple of other things, First off, when I login, the name that is showen is randksprotscards, it should be randksportscards. I will be sending e-mails to customerservice and the webmaster evryday two or three times a day untill things are fixed. I DON’T feel that it is right that we are paying for something that we can’t use. Paying for a service and not being able to use it is not good. The message “Loading, Please Wait” is getting out of hand.
It’s 2020 and the website is still poor