DALLAS – Last week, multiple vendors and sales reps groups in the gift and home industry reported an outage of their wholesale sales platforms powered by MarketTime, and now the cause of the outage has been identified. Wholesale sales platform MarketTime was the victim of an “unauthorized actor” gaining access to the Brandwise network, resulting in the platform going offline.
In an email shared with Furniture Today, MarketTime revealed on May 3 that it “experienced a network disruption emanating from our Brandwise data center involving an unauthorized actor gaining access to the Brandwise network.”
“We want to assure you that protecting your data and ensuring the integrity of the systems you rely on are our top priorities,” the email read. “Our team is working diligently to bring all systems back online in a safe and secure manner. We understand that you rely on our systems to power your business, and we apologize deeply for this situation. This is a challenging time and we want to assure you that we are fully committed to rebuilding your trust through our communication and actions. Our investigation is ongoing, and we will share additional information as appropriate.”
“This widespread outage is impacting the entire wholesale channel, from sales ordering to fulfillment to retailers receiving orders.” – Don McCoy, Core Elements showroom technology provider
In the email, MarketTime noted that once it became aware of the problem, it shut down the system, engaged independent experts, implemented advanced monitoring systems and took comprehensive risk-mitigating measures. It also stated that the MarketTime platform is online with core functionality while its Brandwise platform remains offline.
Furniture Today reached out to MarketTime for comment. This story will be updated.
What the outage means for the industry
Don McCoy, president of Core Elements, a showroom technology provider, told sister publication Gifts & Decorative Accessories in an email that he hasn’t seen an outage of this scope in his 12 years of experience in the industry for any major order management system provider.
“While any protracted systems outage has varying degrees of impact to any business, this is a very rare situation factoring in the many years of wholesale operations with very minimal order systems downtime,” McCoy wrote. “Also, in the modern era, applications have shifted to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model relying entirely on internet connectivity and cloud application service readiness, the major sales order systems – MarketTime, Brandwise, and EMUN – servicing this industry have all still maintained an applications offline mode.
“With these benefits stated, this widespread outage is impacting the entire wholesale channel, from sales ordering to fulfillment to retailers receiving orders.”
To exemplify the scope of the impact of the outage, McCoy pointed out several of the key issues:
- With the inability to sync, sales reps are not obtaining new vendor product additions and/or changes to existing product.
- New sales reps or existing reps are unable to obtain a full product and customer data sync on a sales device
- Vendors are unable to receive new or updated orders
- Significant impact with credit card orders with the retailer and/or card gateway processing
- Retailers receiving orders later than expected
“While pressure will likely exist for swift action, a meticulous and prioritized plan should be established and diligently followed, which typically takes several weeks if not multiple months,” he said.
Editor’s note: Lenise Willis of Gifts & Decorative Accessories co-authored this article.
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