Benefits of Rewind
- Automatic backup and restore capabilities
- Quick and easy installation
- Provides value cross-functionally among teams
“Keeping your website live is critical. Using Rewind to restore lost information means you are not throwing a wrench into the gears of your business.”
– Derek Dunbar, Director of Operations
Building an online empire
ANSgear started as an Army and Surplus retail store in the early days of the internet. Derek Dunbar, Director of Operations, says paintball equipment didn’t take long to become their core focus.
They initially grew the business using first-generation ecommerce technology and eBay as a path to consumers. Their continued success eventually led to their acquisition of five different competitors, making ANSgear the world’s largest online distributor of paintball equipment. Today, the business fulfills over 60,000 orders annually.
“We went from a single domain to having six domains after the burst of acquisitions. We have tens of thousands of SKUs across multiple platforms, such as Volusion, Magento, and Shopify,” said Derek. “We were trying to figure out the future of our primary website. That’s how we found BigCommerce”.
The team at ANSgear evaluated a few options but felt BigCommerce had the best platform to meet the company’s growth needs.
“We typically have six people responsible for web operations, building product listings, taking photos, videos and other administrative work. BigCommerce checked the boxes for having world-class uptime and a catered ecosystem of APIs and Apps.”
A nightmare scenario
Derek says there was a learning curve moving from an antiquated e-commerce platform to a premium solution like BigCommerce. However, the team was pleased they could retain some of their core processes, specifically bulk product builds and modifications, through a CSV file.
Shortly after getting up and running with BigCommerce, the ANSgear team needed to make multiple changes to its product catalogue. Derek says a large section of the product IDs, product types, rules and SKUs were somehow misaligned within the CSV files. The team didn’t catch it until it was too late.
“We were quickly learning the depth of that mistake. Products that were not supposed to have variants now had sizes and/or colors available as dropdowns. Some products that were supposed to have variants now had no options or the ability to be added to the cart. We compromised the entire catalog.” – Derek Dunbar, Director of Operations
Derek says that about 7000 SKUs were impacted in total. The store wasn’t receiving or able to process any orders.
A snapshot is not a backup
ANSgear immediately called BigCommerce for help. The team quickly realized the limitations that cloud applications have when it comes to restoring product data. Cloud software applications, like BigCommerce, cannot restore specific pieces of data and information. It’s often an all-or-nothing scenario. ANSgear could restore a snapshot of its product catalogue from 24 hours earlier; however, any edits or updates made within that period would be undone. Derek says the bad news didn’t stop there.
“To fix the problem, we had to put the website in maintenance mode. We worked on it all night. After thirteen hours, we could finally turn the website back on. We missed a lot of business during that time.”
Derek also says Google was in the process of indexing ANSgear’s newly migrated website, but due to the combination of the maintenance mode and product data rolling back, Google could not access these pages, resulting in issues within Google’s Search Console.
Rewind prevents deja vu
The team at BigCommerce mentioned Rewind as a way to prevent this disaster scenario from happening again. Derek says it was all the convincing he needed. Rewind was installed within 60 minutes of their store coming back online.
“Rewind would have essentially undone what happened to us. We would have been able to choose a point in time and just roll back those products that were affected.”
Shortly after Rewind was installed, the ANSgear team was doing some routine site maintenance. Someone accidentally triggered the deletion of thousands of products for a second time, and recovering from this catastrophic error was much different the second time.
“Because we had Rewind, we could choose just an earlier point in the day for those products and do a single-click restore for those items.”
Derek says other teams are now leveraging Rewind. Web developers are using Rewind’s code view to see when changes to the site were made. One developer requests that it be installed on any new store we work on before any data is created. The customer success team can see when product descriptions or specifications have changed. Derek says that Rewind has become a vital tool they use in daily operations.
“Merchants need to understand the impact of the downtime. You’re going to be pushing your customers away when that happens. Any work that’s been done since that last snapshot will be lost, information from customers modifying their orders will be gone, and external interactions with your website, like search engines, will be all impacted. Using Rewind to restore lost information means you are not throwing a wrench into the gears of your business.”
