Whenever we get to sit down with any of our Ecommerce Agency Partners, there’s one question on our minds: tell me about the last time you lost data.
Wes Buckwalter, CEO at SeaMonster Studios, was kind enough to tell us an anonymized tale of recent data loss – and how Rewind ensured “the day was saved,” says Wes.
“In 2021, one of our clients in the fashion industry lost a small mountain of data. After we had created a new more capable website, our merchant noted their customers needed access to previous store data, like historical order histories and receipts.”
The SeaMonster Studios team began planning how they were going to move ~150k historical orders to a data set that conformed to the Shopify platform’s needs.
“This required a bit of data nerdery and specialization to complete—a task that our client didn’t want to do themselves and found value in our services,” explains Wes. During this process, they discovered that there were several deprecated products that also needed to be created in order to tie order histories to viewable (but out of stock) prior-season products, and an additional data set would need to be created. In this case, the client decided to tackle the product data set creation themselves.
The day came for the migrations: the client was going to push their product data to the site, and SeaMonster Studios would follow by pushing the order histories just after. “As with every site we build, we had Rewind already installed, already backing up the site on the regular,” explains Wes.
As with every site we build, we had Rewind already installed, already backing up the site on the regular.
Wes Buckwalter, CEO at SeaMonster Studios
“At that point, all hell broke loose,” laughs Wes. The panicked client called to say that their products were all missing or incorrect, old products that were out of stock were there, and the current season was gone. The SeaMonster Studios team did some investigation, and the client had accidentally wiped the products from the store as their “ready to import” product data set didn’t contain the current product line.
I smiled, said “don’t worry”, and dove in to Rewind.
Wes Buckwalter, CEO at SeaMonster Studios
“I smiled, said “don’t worry”, and dove in to Rewind. Within an hour, we had everything restored,” explains Wes. The site was back to normal, products were moving, and disaster had been averted.
The team created additional backups and pulled in the historical order data, and all was right with the world.
“This is a legendary story; we tell it often,” laughs Wes. “Without Rewind, the site would have been down for more than a day and managing the subsequent migrations would have been way more difficult as a result.”
Additionally, Wes has noticed Rewind’s effect on his client relationships: “the client would have had to spend more money with us that did not necessarily let us build cool things, just recover the ones they had already paid for,” said Wes. “We bought some street cred with the client and their internal team, and patted ourselves and Rewind on the back for saving the client a ton of time and money.”
A solid backup and restore plan is an essential cost of doing business.
Wes Buckwalter, CEO at SeaMonster Studios
“Human error is a difficult thing to overcome, that’s why a solid backup and restore plan is an essential cost of doing business,” noted Wes. “Whether it’s restoring data from an accidental deletion or compromise, or just having the peace of mind knowing that Rewind’s there if you need it, is why we recommend Rewind to every client.”
Hundreds of ecommerce agencies have partnered with Rewind to save their team time and keep their clients happy. If you build Shopify or BigCommerce stores, we invite you to join our Agency Partner Program!
